Turns out, my parents had forged a version and tried to push it through. But Grandma, ever precise, had mailed the real one to a lawyer in another state and instructed him to send it to me a year after her death.
I could’ve gone public. Could’ve pressed charges. Instead, I mailed them a copy with a note:
“I know.”
They never replied.
I kept the house. Small, with creaky floors and a garden gone wild. It felt like it had been waiting for me. Liana and I moved in that spring. She planted sunflowers. I painted the walls. We filled it with secondhand furniture and first-rate joy. We hosted dinners, game nights, little writing workshops at the kitchen table. The neighbors started calling it “the story house.”
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