Vincent Marlowe opened his leather folder on the hood of my dead car, because I had nowhere else to offer him, and turned the first page toward me. “Your grandfather knew your father,” he said carefully. “He knew what kind of man he was. So he wrote the inheritance with a protection built into it.” He tapped a clause. “The estate passes to you and you alone, held in a trust you control at eighteen. Your father, his wife, and your stepbrother are named specifically. Not as heirs. As excluded parties. If any of them ever tries to access it, borrow against it, or take custody of it through you, the attempt voids their claim entirely and permanently.”

I read the words twice, my hands shaking from more than the cold. “Why would he do that? I never even met him.” Vincent’s face softened. “Because your grandfather tried to be in your life. Your father kept him away. Told him you wanted nothing to do with him, and cashed the support checks Edmund mailed for you every month for years.” My throat closed. The shoebox savings. The rent I supposedly owed. The money for my stepbrother’s future. All of it, sitting on top of years of my grandfather’s checks that had never once reached me. “How much,” I finally asked, “is everything?” Vincent told me. And behind a row of dumpsters, on the ninth day of living in my car, I sat down hard on the pavement.