Chloe laughed. Then she was quiet.
“I wish I’d known him better,” she said. “Grandpa.”
“He loved you, Chlo. He said that in the letter. He loved all of us.”
“But he trusted you.”
I didn’t answer that.
She was right. He did. And it took me a long time to understand that being trusted with something isn’t the same as being loved more. It’s just a different kind of weight.
At night, when everyone’s gone home and the house is quiet, I sometimes go down to the basement.
The cot is gone. I gave it to a thrift store. The bare lamp is gone too.
But the safe is still there, under the panel behind the storage bins. The deed is still in it, in its waterproof sleeve.
And now there’s something else.
Last month, I wrote a letter.
It’s addressed to Wren. On the front, in my handwriting, square and slanted like my grandfather’s, it says: For Wren. Only if.
I hope she never has to read it.
But if the ground ever shakes under her, I want her to have somewhere to stand.
I closed the safe, set the panel back in place, and stacked the storage bins in front of it, exactly the way they were.
Then I went upstairs, and turned off the lights, and sat in my grandfather’s chair by the window for a while, looking out at the pine trees he planted when they were no taller than me.
For most of my life, I thought being a good sister meant making myself smaller.
It doesn’t.
Sometimes being good to the people you love means standing all the way up, in your own house, and refusing to be moved.
My boots are by the front door.
