The will reading happened four days later, in a downtown law office belonging to a man named Franklin Coy, who I’d never once met in all my years knowing Mrs. Vance.
I sat in that office expecting, at minimum, some small acknowledgment. A keepsake. A single line naming me, even briefly, among everything else she’d built and spent and loved across eighty-five years.
I got nothing. Not one word.
The morning after the reading, somebody knocked on my door before I’d even finished my first cup of coffee.
Franklin Coy stood on my front step, a slim leather folder tucked under one arm, looking almost apologetic before he’d said a single word.
“Mr. Combs,” he said. “Elijah Combs?”
“That’s me.”
“May I come in? I think there’s something you deserve to hear properly, away from the family, and I owe Mrs. Vance the courtesy of explaining it the way she instructed me to.”
I stepped back and let him in, my heart already beating faster than I wanted to admit.
We sat at my small kitchen table, the same kind of chipped mug I’d used a hundred times over at Featherstone Lane sitting empty between us.
“I need to apologize,” Franklin said, “for the way yesterday’s reading must have felt. I know it looked like Mrs. Vance left you out entirely. I promise you, that wasn’t the whole truth. It was, in fact, the opposite of the whole truth.”
“It was the opposite of the whole truth.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
Franklin opened the folder and slid a document across the table.
“Do you remember signing paperwork with Mrs. Vance over the last three years? Title company visits, mostly?”
