“Six weeks?”
“Actually, the situation started before that. My office was helping settle another estate, and your father’s name appeared during the search.”
She nodded toward the envelope.
“He wanted you to read his letter before I explained anything.”
My hands shook as I broke the seal.
Inside was a handwritten letter and several documents.
The first sentence made me stop breathing.
**Grant, I need you to understand one thing before anything else. I am your father. Nothing in these papers changes that.**
I kept reading.
Then my entire childhood rearranged itself.
Dad explained that I had been born to his younger sister, Eleanor.
The woman I had always believed was simply a distant relative.
She had been seventeen.
Dad was twenty-six and already married to the woman I grew up calling Mom.
They had been trying unsuccessfully to have a child.
When Eleanor became pregnant, the family made a decision.
Dad and Mom would raise the baby.
Me.
The arrangement had been private.
Quiet.
Handled through an old family attorney.
Eleanor was sent away during the pregnancy.
When she returned, nobody spoke about what had happened again.
Dad and Mom raised me as their own.
And in every way that mattered to him, Dad wrote, that was exactly what I was.
His son.
But eight weeks earlier, Eleanor had died.
She never married.
Never had another child.
And she left a will.
Everything she owned was left to the son she had given up in 1989.
