Delroy and your brother had split your sixty-three thousand dollars and put it into a commercial building on Main Street — a storefront with apartments over it.

Your mother threatened to take what she knew to the police.

To keep himself and Lonnie out of a fraud case, Delroy signed his half of that property over into a trust.

In your name.”

My breath caught.

Sixty-three thousand dollars.

Not the nothing Delroy had wept about at Mama’s kitchen table.

And Lonnie. My brother hadn’t merely known about it.