The letter is safely kept inside our house, tucked into Mom’s Bible.
Theresa said something that important shouldn’t be left in a truck.
But the envelope with Phil’s calculations remains beneath the passenger seat.
Exactly where Dad had hidden his letter.
Sometimes I think about those four months after the funeral.
How angry I was.
How certain I felt that Dad had overlooked everything I’d sacrificed.
How stubbornly I refused to ask my brother for help.
And how Phil spent those same months believing he had to prove he deserved the farm.
Dad had tried to protect both of us.
He’d known I would sacrifice everything to keep the land.
And he’d trusted Phil to divide the inheritance fairly.
But his silence nearly destroyed the relationship between his sons.
In the end, it wasn’t the will that saved the farm.
It was a letter he’d been afraid to mail.
