Chapter 4 - THE CRIB
The wood was old.
Smooth at one edge.
Splintered at the other.
“What is this?”
Harvey sat beside my hospital bed.
“It came from your crib.”
My breath caught.
The crib my grandfather had built.
The one Dad destroyed.
Harvey nodded.
“Walter carved the entire thing by hand.”
I ran my thumb over the wood.
“Why do you have it?”
“Because your grandfather asked me to save whatever I could.”
I began crying before I could stop myself.
Harvey opened the briefcase.
Inside were envelopes.
Dozens.
My name appeared across them in handwriting I barely remembered.
Birthday letters.
Christmas cards.
Graduation letters.
One for my eighteenth birthday.
One for my twenty-first.
None had ever reached me.
“Why didn’t he give these to me?”
“He tried.”
“What happened?”
“Your father banned him from the house.”
That shouldn’t have surprised me.
It still did.
“Why?”
Harvey sighed.
“Walter knew how Gregory treated you.”
I looked at him.
“He knew?”
“He knew more than you think.”
My grandfather died when I was seventeen.
By then, Dad had convinced me Walter simply didn’t care enough to visit.
Another lie.
Harvey continued.
“Walter kept hoping your father would change.”
“He didn’t.”
“No.”
Harvey looked toward the window.
“Eventually Walter stopped hoping.”
He took out one envelope.
Unlike the others, it was sealed with a small strip of yellowed tape.
“This was supposed to reach you under specific circumstances.”
“What circumstances?”
“Janice will explain that.”
“Who’s Janice?”
Harvey stared at me.
“Your aunt.”
I almost laughed.
“I don’t have an aunt.”
“Yes, Sadie.”
He smiled sadly.
“You do.”
“My father never had a sister.”
“He told you he didn’t.”
Another secret.
Another person erased from my childhood because Gregory Davis decided I shouldn’t know she existed.
Harvey rested the sealed envelope on my blanket.
“Your grandfather spent the final years of his life preparing for the possibility that Gregory might become exactly the man you saw on that sidewalk.”
I looked at him.
“What did he prepare?”
Harvey hesitated.
“Protection.”
The next morning, Janice Foster walked into my room.
She had my father’s eyes.
But nothing else about her reminded me of him.
She carried a thick legal folder.
“Sadie?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Gregory’s older sister.”
She sat down.
Then she placed the folder on my bed.
“Your grandfather left something behind.”
I glanced at Harvey’s envelope.
“A letter?”
“More than that.”
Janice opened the folder.
May you like
“Your grandfather rewrote his will.”
And according to her, my father’s violence had just activated the most important clause in it.
