Chapter 1 — A Wednesday Morning

My father’s lawyer called on a Wednesday morning while I stood in the hospital parking lot, pressing the lock button on my car key over and over, wondering whether I’d actually locked the doors.

The call caught me off guard, though it shouldn’t have. Dad had been growing weaker for two years, so I knew the day would come. Still, when the call announcing a death finally arrives, it always feels as though you should have been doing something more meaningful than standing in a parking lot fussing with your keys.

I pressed the button one last time as the lawyer finished speaking.

His name was Gerald Marsh, and he had the calm, practiced gentleness of someone who had delivered hard news many times. He told me my father had died at 6:14 that morning, that I’d been named executor of the estate, and that we needed to meet to discuss several matters.

“What kind of matters?” I asked.

He paused. “Matters that will require your full attention, Ms. Calloway. When you’re ready.”

We arranged to meet on Friday.

Chapter 2 — The Calloways

My name is Ellen Calloway. I was thirty-seven, working as a hospital administrator in a medium-sized Ohio city I’d moved to at twenty-four and never left.

My father, Roy Calloway, lived forty minutes away in the gray colonial where I grew up — the one with the bright red front door and the creek out back that had “eaten” my shoe when I was little.

Or so I always insisted.