PART 3 (Finale)
Greg smoothed his shirt and opened the door, already rehearsing his handshake for the realtor.
It wasn’t him.
A young woman stood on the porch, maybe twenty-eight, holding a blue folder and a ring of keys. Something in her face — the set of her jaw — reminded me so much of Walter my breath caught.
Greg’s expression cracked. “You,” he whispered.
“Hello, Dad,” she said.
Her name is Josephine. I’d met her four months earlier in my lawyer’s office, when he told me a young woman had inquired about the house because her mother had once lived in this town — pregnant, decades ago, before leaving and never coming back. Josephine had grown up hearing stories about a man named Greg who never knew, or never chose to know, she existed. She found the old listing by accident while researching her father’s hometown, and froze when she saw the address.
I hadn’t sold my house to a stranger. I’d sold it to my granddaughter.
I never told Greg. But after six months of watching him take my bedroom, my dignity, and three hundred dollars a month from an old woman he thought had nothing left to lose, I decided he could learn what it felt like to have something taken without warning.
“This is my house,” Josephine said, holding up the blue folder. “I own it. Grandma has a lease for as long as she wants. You and Dana have thirty days.”
Dana’s cookies sat untouched. Greg stood frozen in the doorway of the house his father built, being told by the daughter he’d abandoned that he had no claim to it at all.
“Mom. Why didn’t you tell me?” he finally asked.
I set down my teacup. “You didn’t ask who owned the house, Greg. You told me. Twice. I simply answered the question you never bothered asking properly.”
“She’s a stranger,” Dana snapped.
“She’s family,” I said. “The only kind that showed up asking questions instead of handing me a suitcase.”
The realtor arrived at ten-fifteen to a driveway gone silent, and left without getting out of his car.
Greg and Dana moved out within the month. Josephine visits most Sundays now. We sit in the sewing room — slowly becoming a sewing room again — and she asks about the grandfather she never met. I tell her everything.
Sometimes she catches me looking at her a certain way. She just smiles. “I know, Grandma. I see him too.”
The suitcase is back in the closet, right where it belongs. I’m not going anywhere.
— END —