My Fiancé Chose My Best Friend-At My Dad’s Funeral novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: The Reading

My father's lawyer worked above a dry cleaner on Banksville Road.

The stairs smelled like starch. At the top, a gray-haired woman in a green cardigan held the door and looked at me over her glasses.

"You're Emmett's girl," she said. "You have his chin."

I had come alone. Braden had texted six times since Saturday asking to come with me, and Lenora had sent a long message with a heart on every line.

I'd answered none of them.

The lawyer sat me in a leather chair across from her desk and slid a box of tissues toward me before I needed one.

"Your father was a stubborn man," she said. "Thirty-one years a client. He never once let me raise my rate."

"He didn't have much money," I said.

"Let's see."

She opened a folder and read in an even voice.

The house in Dormont. The pickup truck. A savings account with forty-one thousand dollars in it, which made me put my hand over my mouth.

"There's one more item," she said. "EH Holdings."

"I found the ledger," I said. "I don't understand it."

She took off her glasses.

"EH Holdings owns the Merchants Building on Penn Avenue. All ten floors. Your father bought it in 1994, when nobody wanted downtown. He bought it with overtime, a loan he paid off in 2019, and every spare dollar he ever had."

I stared at her.

"He was a bus mechanic."

"He was a bus mechanic who read every commercial listing in the Sunday paper for thirty years." Her mouth moved a little. "It's yours now, Ms. Harlan. The company, the building, all of it."

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