I understood, sitting there, that I could simply walk away with everything Bennett had built, entirely within my rights, and nobody in that hospital or that courthouse would ever question my claim to it.
I understood I could simply walk away with everything, entirely within my rights.
I also understood, reading that letter a second time, that keeping it all quietly would mean burying exactly the thing Bennett had spent his final letter asking me not to bury.
Finding Desmond took three weeks of careful searching — a records request through Gerald's office, an old employer listed on a decade-old letter, eventually a phone number for a construction firm in Ashport, two states away, where Desmond had apparently worked steadily for the past six years.
I didn't call. I drove there instead, the green backpack sitting on my passenger seat the whole six-hour drive, working out what I might possibly say to a man who'd spent twenty years refusing to hear anything at all from the father who raised him.
