My hand closed around the paper.

For sixteen years, I had trained myself not to imagine my father regretting anything. Regret was dangerous. Hope was worse. I had turned him into a coward in my mind because anger was easier to carry than longing.

But there it was.

Ink.

Proof.

A flare fired too late from a man trapped behind enemy lines.

At eight the next morning, I drove to Bridgewater beneath a sky the color of wet steel. Margaret Vance’s office sat between a laundromat and a hardware store. She was a small woman with sharp eyes and no patience for ceremony.

“You look like him,” she said when I walked in.

“That’s unfortunate,” I replied.

She almost smiled.

Then she placed a folder on her desk.

“Your father came to me fourteen months ago. He was frightened but lucid. I brought in a psychiatrist to evaluate him before he signed anything because he said Vivian would claim he was confused. The doctor’s affidavit is attached.”

I opened the folder.

The legal language blurred until I found the line that mattered.

To my daughter, Milly Davis, I leave the property known as the Miller Hill Estate in full, including all land, structures, personal effects, and accounts attached to its maintenance.

I read it again.

The house.

My mother’s house.

The fortress on the hill.