Chapter 2 - What Colleen Left BehindWhat I pulled out wasn't a stone or a coin. It was a small velvet pouch, cinched shut with an old piece of string gone stiff with age.

I set it on the counter and cut the string with a paring knife. When I turned it over, two things fell out onto the wood.

An old brass key.

And a piece of paper, folded into a tight square, yellowed at the creases.

My hands were shaking so bad it took me two tries to unfold it. I recognized her handwriting right away, even though it was steadier than I'd ever seen it — this had been written years before her arthritis got bad.

My dearest Norah,

If you're reading this, then I've gone on to be with my husband again.

I had to stop and breathe before I kept going.

For years, my children believed I lost everything when the farm went under. They thought I was nothing but a burden they had to take turns putting up with. They never knew there was something else.

She wrote that her own grandfather had left her a safe-deposit box at a bank in Lexington, decades back. Box 412. Inside it were the original deeds to forty acres of land near the new highway bypass — land bought long before anybody in that county thought it would ever be worth anything.

Then came the part that broke me open.

My children never once asked about my life before they came along. The minute they figured I had nothing left to hand them, they stopped making time for me.

But you stayed, Norah.

You held my hand when I was scared. You wiped my face when I missed my husband so bad it hurt. You looked after me because you loved me, not because you owed me anything.

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The key in your hand opens Box 412. The property's already been moved into a trust with your name on it. It's yours now. Don't let anybody talk you out of what your own heart earned.

I sat down right there at the kitchen table and cried until I couldn't see straight. It wasn't confusion at the end. She'd known exactly what she was doing. She'd spent twelve years watching who actually stayed when she had nothing left to offer anybody, and she'd made sure that person would be taken care of once she was gone.