My parents skipped the funeral of my husband and two children because it was my sister’s birthday. When I begged them to come, my father calmly said, “Today is your sister’s birthday. We can’t come.” Six months later, one headline about me made my entire family panic when they learned I had...

May came in with a smell of wet lilacs and diesel exhaust.

The foundation office had expanded into the second floor of the brick warehouse on Shockoe Slip, taking over three rooms that had once belonged to an importer of Brazilian tobacco. The walls were painted a clean, pale gray, and the windows looked out over the cobblestones where the horse-drawn carriages used to wait for the riverboats.

On my desk sat the family registry I’d taken from the O Street house back in January.

I hadn't opened it in three months. It lay there beneath a stack of grant applications from highway safety groups in North Carolina and South Carolina, its leather spine cracked and dry, smelling of old glue and dead relatives who had never imagined an interstate highway or a twenty-ton truckload of drywall.

The door opened without a knock. It was Margaret, holding a white paper bag from the bakery on Broad Street and two paper cups of black coffee.

"There’s a letter for you downstairs," she said, dropping the bag onto the center of the desk. "Hand-delivered by a courier from a law firm in Fairfax."

I didn't touch the bag. "From my father?"

"No," Margaret said, pulling out a wooden chair and sitting down opposite me. "From the bankruptcy trustee handling the O Street property. The auction proceeds have been distributed. The bank got its principal, the restaurant got its twenty-four thousand dollars for the canceled wedding, and the state got its back property taxes."

"And my parents?"

"They’re officially indigent," Margaret said calmly, biting into a corner of her lemon pound cake. "The apartment in Bethesda is being paid for by your uncle Howard out in Chicago—at least until August, when his patience runs out."

She slid a small, white envelope across the oak table. It wasn't legal paper this time. It was a cheap, business-sized envelope from an office supply store, addressed in a hand that looked like it had been written by someone whose fingers were shaking too hard to hold the pen steady.

I picked it up with two fingers, turned it over, and broke the seal with the edge of a brass letter opener.

Inside was a single square of yellow legal paper, covered in my father’s cramped, judicial handwriting—the script that had once signed judgments, injunctions, and dismissals across three judicial districts in Northern Virginia.

Claire,

The Supreme Court of Virginia denied our petition for a rehearing on the estate management statutes this morning. The firm is dissolved. The library has been dispersed to the county law school.

Your mother has stopped speaking about the wedding.

I have nothing left to give you, and nothing left to take away. If you ever come to Bethesda, the dry cleaner downstairs has decent coffee.

Arthur

I read it twice. Then I folded it back up, slipped it inside the leather registry between the pages for nineteen-forty-two—the year my father was born—and closed the heavy cover with a soft, dry thud.