“How much money, Grandpa?”
“What?”
“When you sold Whitfield. How much?”
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he said a number.
Fourteen million dollars.
I drove home that night and didn’t sleep.
At three in the morning, Daniel found me at our kitchen table with my laptop open and six legal pads covered in notes.
Daniel is a carpenter. He builds custom furniture in a workshop behind his brother’s house. He has sawdust in his hair most days and the biggest heart of anyone I’ve ever met. My parents met him exactly twice. Both times, my mother asked him what his “real job” was.
He sat down across from me and pulled one of the legal pads toward him.
“Talk to me,” he said.
I told him everything.
When I finished, he didn’t say anything for a long time. Then he said, “What do you need?”
