They Left Me to Die, So I Came Home Undefeated novel · Chapter 22 of 24
Chapter 22: Her Mother's Letter
The house was gray and silent when I followed the nurse up the stairs.
The guards were gone from the landing.
Someone had swept up the glass.
My grandfather was propped on his pillows in the big room at the top, with the curtains open on the dock cranes and their red lights.
He looked smaller than he had at dinner, and calmer.
The white-eyebrowed lawyer sat at the table by the window with a stack of papers and a pen.
"Sit, little wolf," the old man said.
I sat on the edge of the bed.
"I thought I would die before I got you home," he said. "I would have, if you hadn't come."
"Nonno."
"Let me finish. I have not many mornings left, and I am an old man who talks."
He lifted his chin toward the lawyer.
The lawyer brought the papers over and laid them on the blanket.
There were three pages, each with a seal at the bottom and a line for a signature.
"The company's shares," my grandfather said. "The cranes, the piers, the shipping line, the land. In your grandmother's name, by her terms, to the first-born granddaughter at eighteen."
He took the pen in his shaking hand.
"I give it freely, with my blessing. I should have done it five years ago."
He signed, one page, two pages, three.
The nurse and the lawyer put their names beneath his.
I took the pen when he held it out to me.
I signed my name three times, and I wrote Montanari every time.
It was the first time I had written it in five years, and my hand did not shake at all.
"Good," Nonno said. "Now the other thing."
The nurse brought a small black book from the drawer by his bed.
It was a missal, worn at the corners, with a faded ribbon in it.
He opened it to the ribbon.
A cream envelope lay flat between the pages.
Her handwriting ran across the front, in blue ink.
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