As of this morning, Evelyn, you are the exclusive owner of everything that was taken from Julian Vance.

The full value is difficult to state precisely, but it is in the neighborhood of seventy-four million dollars.”

I did not answer for a long moment.

I looked down at the plain gold band on my hand, and then at the blue folder, and I felt the number pass over me without landing, too large to hold.

For two years after my mother died I had lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment over a laundromat in downtown Boston, counting out nickels to cover my meals on shift days, volunteering at the hospice on my time off because it was the only thing that made the grief bearable.

I had spent my entire adult life believing I was a loose fragment of a broken family, a girl whose father had vanished before her first breath because he simply had not cared enough to stay.