Chapter 3: The Son Who Came Looking
I held the phone against my ear and didn't speak for a moment.
"How did you get this number?" I finally said.
"My father wrote it in a letter he sent me," Daniel said.
"The same day he sent yours."
I looked down at the pages still spread across my kitchen table.
Larry had written two letters.
One to me.
One to his son.
On the same day.
With the same shaking hand.
"What do you want, Daniel?"
"I want to meet you." He paused.
"I don't want to fight you, if that's what you're thinking.
I just need to understand what my father was doing."
I almost said no.
Every reasonable part of me said to hang up, call a lawyer, say nothing.
But I thought about Larry's face on that last morning at the hospice.
The way he had held my hand and looked at the ceiling instead of at me.
Like there was something he still needed to say and had run out of time to say it.
"Tomorrow," I said.
"There's a coffee shop on Mercer Street.
Eleven o'clock."
He was already there when I arrived.
Daniel was in his mid-forties, broad-shouldered, with Larry's same quiet eyes.
He stood when he saw me come through the door.
He didn't smile.
Neither did I.
We sat across from each other with two untouched cups between us.
"He never told me about you," Daniel said.
"Not once, in all the months I was trying to reach him.
He mentioned a woman at the subway station.
Said she was kind.
That was all."
"He never told me about you either," I said.
Daniel looked at the table.
"I found him eight months ago.
Took me four years of searching.
When I finally tracked him to that shelter, I thought — " He stopped.
Pressed his lips together.
"I thought we'd have time."
"He told me he had a month," I said.
"He didn't tell me he had a son who was looking for him."
"He was ashamed." Daniel's jaw tightened.
"He left when I was four.
My mother raised me alone.
He spent thirty years convinced we were better off.
By the time I found him, he'd already decided he didn't deserve to come back."
I thought about the sign.
*I don't want to die as nobody, Sarah.*
"He asked me to marry him so he wouldn't die alone," I said carefully.
"That's what he told me."
Daniel nodded slowly.
"That's part of it."
I set my cup down.
"What's the other part?"
He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and placed a folded document on the table between us.
I didn't touch it yet.
"My father wasn't always homeless," Daniel said.
"Before everything fell apart — before he left us — he owned property.
A small piece of land upstate, left to him by his own father.
He never sold it.
He just…
walked away from it.
The same way he walked away from everything."
I looked at the document.
"That land," Daniel said quietly, "is now worth just under two million dollars."
The coffee shop noise seemed to drop away.
"And because he married you," Daniel continued, "his legal next of kin situation became complicated.
My lawyer says that as his widow, you may have a claim.
Depending on how the estate is structured, you could be entitled to a significant portion."
I stared at him.
"I'm not here to take anything from you," he said quickly.
"I want you to understand that.
But there are other people involved.
People who found out about that land before either of us did."
"What people?"
Daniel's expression shifted.
Something careful moved behind his eyes.
"My father had a brother," he said.
"Uncle Reeves.
And the moment my father d*ed — Reeves filed his own claim on the estate."
He tapped the document on the table.
May you like
"He filed it the same day Larry was buried.
Before the letter even reached you."
