Prologue

I think sometimes a defining moment in life can hit you out of left field. For example, I had no idea my life would change forever when I opened the mailbox on a bright and sunny September day.

I expected the usual junk mail, and maybe a few bills to add to my growing collection. I found all of that along with a circular for the latest fashions at Sears and a letter from a law office in a place called Kilmarnock, Virginia.

My great aunt lived in Virginia, but I knew she didn’t work for an attorney. Come to think of it, I hadn’t heard from her in a while.

The thin letter felt heavy in my hand. I barely kept myself from ripping it open as I walked up the driveway. Before I hit the door, I heard my father’s booming voice. I could swear it rattled the fronds on the palm tree standing in the dinner-plate-sized front yard.

“Anything good in the mail, Ivy?” my dad yelled from the living room of our old house as I entered the small foyer. “I’m waiting for the Sears catalog.”

I was so entranced by the letter and the secrets it might hold, I didn’t answer him right away, which earned me yet another eardrum-shaking yell.

“Yes, yes,” I said impatiently, and walked toward my father’s bellow. I handed him the Sears catalog. At least it would keep him entertained for some time and out of my hair while I read what an attorney from Virginia could want with a girl who’d lived in California all her twenty-four years.

Leaving my father to drool over tools and the latest in flannel, I rushed up the stairs and into my room. My mom had decorated it all in pink shortly before she died, and I hadn’t managed to repaint it yet. At ten, the room was beautiful, but fourteen years later it needed an overhaul. I would have loved to paint it a nice taupe, but every time I made some noise about changing the color my dad would get this look of agony on his face and I’d drop the subject. It was a pattern he realized worked well on me, and he wasn’t one to change things when they worked, so we were at an impasse. Still, every time I entered the entirely pink domain, I got depressed and wanted out of the room, out of his house. I could keep on dreaming because, as the youngest of four girls and the only one not married, I was stuck here helping him, trying to be a good daughter, when all I really wanted was to break away. Plus, housing costs were so high, there was no way I could afford to live on my own.

From the fuchsia desk on the far wall I picked up a letter opener and made a slit in the envelope. Questions tumbled over one another in my head. What could this be? Could it have something to do with my great-aunt Gertie, whom I hadn’t heard from in ages? Why the personal attention? Was it good news or bad news?

Why was I getting worked up over a stupid envelope?

Finally, I wrestled the cheap plastic opener through the heavy paper. For once I didn’t snag the letter and cut it in my haste to open the envelope.

Yanking the single tri-folded sheet out, two words jumped out at me like that hot-looking guy my friends hired to burst from my oversized birthday cake last month: your inheritance.