Elise moved beside me and read the next paragraph silently.

Arthur wrote that I had given him something the money in his house could not buy: the expectation that somebody would knock on his door the following Sunday.

He called me the family he had found, not the family he had lost.

Only then did we read about the three hundred thousand dollars, the deed to the house held in a trust, and the separate papers the attorney had prepared.

Elise gripped the back of a chair.