That cabin was mine.

Which is exactly why what I found in the driveway that morning cut the way it did.

They had not merely trespassed on my property.

They had backed a moving van up to the one door in the world I had kept sacred, and begun carrying their furniture into the last place I had left where my wife still seemed alive.

When I rounded the last bend of the damp gravel drive, my heart dropped into my boots, because a large moving van was backed up flush against the front porch steps.

For a moment I honestly wondered whether I’d taken a wrong turn somewhere on the county road.

Then I saw my son-in-law’s parents carrying cardboard boxes through my front door, and I understood that I had not gotten lost at all.

Someone else had simply decided the cabin was theirs.

Chapter 2 — My Son Gave Us the Code

Greg Pruitt set a heavy bronze table lamp down on the porch deck, cracked open a cold can of beer, and grinned at me wide and easy, like a man greeting a neighbor at a barbecue.

“Morning, Edmund,” he said, and gave me a lazy little wave.

“What in the world are you doing inside my house, Greg?” I said, climbing out of my truck into the cold.

His wife, Marlene, froze on the threshold with a packing crate in her arms, the word KITCHEN scrawled across the side in black marker.

Greg took a slow pull off the can and leaned against the railing my wife and I had built with our own hands.