My father threw me out on my eighteenth birthday, stole the $3,000 I’d saved from working after school, and used it for my stepbrother. Nine days later, while I was digging through a restaurant dumpster for something to eat, a stranger in an expensive suit called my name and told me my supposedly dead grandfather had left me everything. But there was one condition nobody had warned me about.

“Don’t make any decisions about your father until you’ve read everything.”

I wanted to ask what he meant, but he was already walking toward the black sedan parked along the curb.

“Richard.”

He stopped.

“Did my father ask you to find me?”

“No.”

“Then who did?”

Richard looked back at me.

“Your grandfather.”

The answer followed me long after he drove away.

At the motel, I sat on the edge of a narrow bed and held the envelope in both hands.

The room smelled of industrial soap and old carpet. A television mounted across from me played a daytime talk show with the sound turned low. Outside, tires hissed over wet pavement.

I had spent nine nights sleeping in my car, yet the clean sheets made me uncomfortable. They felt too generous, too temporary.

The envelope had no seal.

Inside was a single folded letter and a small photograph.