If you had asked me, a week before that morning, about Arthur Vance, I would have shrugged and told you he was my mother’s brother, that they had not spoken in years, that I did not know why and had never particularly cared to.

He was ancient history, a closed chapter, irrelevant to my actual life of shifts and tuition and tips.

And now his name was at the bottom of a legal document connected to my mother’s estate, and photographs of my apartment were spread across my manager’s desk, and I was beginning to understand that the closed chapter had never actually been closed at all, that a whole hidden story had been running underneath my visible life the entire time, and that I had been living inside the consequences of choices I did not know had been made.

Chapter 15 — Arthur Vance, Lead Attorney