He died the following February, in his sleep, in his own bed, in his own cottage. He was eighty-four. The coroner said his heart just stopped. Peacefully.
He left everything to be split three ways. A third to a scholarship fund at UConn for students who’d worked their way through school. A third to an elder-advocacy group that helps old people get out of bad conservatorships. And a third to me.
Helen Park handed me something else, the day she read his will.
An envelope. Yellow legal paper inside. His square handwriting on the front.
Miss Emma Kowalski. Letter number 142.
I didn’t open it at the lawyer’s office. I took it home. I sat in the old attic chair I’d brought from my parents’ house when they sold it. Daniel had sanded it down and refinished it, and now it sat by the window in our new house. A house with a heating vent in every room.
