Chapter 1 - The Man Who Had a NameThe sole of my shoe came loose while I was standing in my own kitchen.
I heard the soft flap of it against the tile before I even looked down.
"Seriously?"
The shoe was old, worn thin at the heel, but it wasn't ruined. There was always a difference to me between old and ruined. Old you could still fix.
I found a tube of shoe glue under the sink, sat down at the kitchen table, and worked it carefully around the loose edge the way I'd taught myself years ago in some house I could barely remember.
Clean it first.
Press firmly.
Wait.
Some habits survive childhood because they're useful. Others just stay lodged in your body long after your mind has tried to let them go.
I was still holding the sole down when three sharp knocks landed on my door.
I wiped the glue off my fingers and opened it.
A man in a dark, expensive suit stood on my welcome mat like he'd never once had to worry about rent.
"Are you Susan Cole?"
"Depends who's asking."
He introduced himself as Marcus Webb, an attorney. For one panicked second I thought something had gone wrong with my taxes or my lease. Then he said, "I represent your father."
I laughed right in his face. "I don't have one."
His expression didn't move an inch. "His name is Edmund."
I just stared at him. For twenty-six years I'd wondered if my father was dead, or gone, or just some subject nobody wanted to bring up at Thanksgiving. Now, out of nowhere, he had a name.
My hand tightened on the door. "Wrong Susan."
"No."
I started to swing it shut. Right before the latch caught, Marcus said, "Your mother's name was Rosalind."
I froze with the door half closed.
"Edmund has been trying to find you," he went on.
"Trying?"
"He's very ill."
"How ill?"
"His doctors don't believe he has much time left."
I almost shut the door anyway. Then Marcus said the one sentence I had spent most of my childhood quietly imagining, late at night, in houses that were never mine.
"His last wish is to see his daughter."
Two days later I stood outside a house that honestly looked like it had wandered off a magazine cover and gotten lost somewhere in the Georgia countryside outside Savannah.
Calling it a house felt almost insulting. It was an estate — stone columns, a circular drive, windows taller than the entire bedroom I'd once shared with three other foster girls when I was eleven years old.
"This is where he lives?"
"Yes," Marcus said.
"For how long?"
He hesitated a beat too long. "Many years."
Many years.
While I was learning which foster homes locked the pantry after dinner. While I wore other kids' hand-me-downs to school with the tags still visible on the inside. While I learned never to fully unpack a bag, because someone might decide by next month I "wasn't a good fit."
My father had been here the entire time.
A woman opened the front door before we'd even reached the porch. Late thirties, polished, moving through that enormous entryway like she owned every square inch of it — because she basically did.
"You must be Susan."
"That's me."
"I'm Vivian. Edmund's real daughter."
The words landed flat and blunt, no apology attached to them at all. Marcus shifted uncomfortably beside me.
Vivian stepped aside without another word. "He's upstairs."
I walked past her, and I felt her eyes on my back the entire way up.
Edmund hadn't spent decades alone regretting the daughter he'd lost. He'd simply had another one, and apparently done a much better job the second time around.
He looked smaller than I'd built him up to be in my head. For most of my life he'd been a faceless man who'd somehow decided I wasn't worth the trouble of finding. Now he was just an old man in a bed — thin wrists, hollow cheeks, a blanket pulled up high across a chest that barely seemed to be moving.
The moment I stepped through the door, his eyes filled.
"You look exactly like Rosalind."
I stayed standing. I didn't move an inch closer to that bed.
"Did you know where I was?" I asked.
He closed his eyes. "Yes."
One word. That was all it took to knock the air straight out of me.
"Yes?" My voice climbed before I could stop it. "You knew?"
"Susan —"
"I went into foster care when I was six years old."
"I know."
"I slept in eight different houses before I turned twelve."
His mouth started trembling. "I know."
"I went to bed hungry more nights than I can count."
He looked away from me, toward the window.
"I wore shoes until the soles split wide open, and glued them back together myself because nobody else was going to."
I swallowed the worst of what I wanted to say next.
"And this whole time, you were living here?"
Edmund started to cry.
"Don't," I said sharply. "Don't cry like this happened to you."
He flinched like I'd struck him. "You're right. It didn't."
I turned toward the door. His hand shot out and caught mine — weaker than I expected, but it held.
"I have no excuse, Susan."
I looked down at his fingers wrapped around mine and didn't pull away, though every part of me wanted to.
"And I have no right to ask you for anything," he murmured.
"Then don't."
His grip loosened, but he didn't let go completely. "Give me seven days."
"Why?"
His breathing had gone thin and shallow. "Because time is the one thing I don't have left to waste."
May you like
I should have walked out of that room and never looked back.
Instead, I sat down in the chair beside his bed.
