And I got a settlement check for eleven thousand dollars and a handshake from a lawyer who was already late for his next case.
When the list of assets reached my grandfather’s cabin, the judge glanced at the documents and ruled that it stayed with me. Direct inheritance received before the marriage. Never incorporated into marital property.
Brandon rolled his eyes.
His lawyer shrugged.
An old cabin in the middle of nowhere. Nobody cared.
I did not cry in the courtroom. I held it together until I reached the parking lot, and then I sat in the passenger seat of Megan’s car and stared at the dashboard until she finally asked if I wanted to go somewhere.
“I don’t have anywhere to go,” I said.
She was quiet for a second.
Then she said, “What about your grandfather’s cabin up by the lake?”
It really was the only place I had left.
Grandpa Arthur died when I was thirty-one. He left the cabin to me, just the cabin and nothing else. My mother rolled her eyes when the will was read.
“A shack in the woods,” she had called it. “That’s what you get for being his favorite.”
She and my uncle split his savings, which was not much. Nobody wanted to fight over the cabin.
Brandon never wanted to go there either. He said it was too far from everything, too old, too quiet. At the hearing, when the judge said the cabin stayed with me, Brandon laughed under his breath. A cabin worth nothing. That was my grand prize.
But now it was all I had.
That was how I ended up there, driving four hours north with everything I owned in two suitcases, turning into a gravel driveway that was now more weeds than gravel, standing in front of a door I could not open.
I found a rock by the woodpile. It took six hits to break the padlock.
The door swung open, and the smell hit me first. Pine. Dust. And beneath both of those, something else I recognized instantly.
Cedar.
Grandpa Arthur kept cedar blocks in every drawer and every closet. He said it kept the moths away, but I always suspected he simply loved the smell.
I stepped inside. The beam from my flashlight moved slowly across the room, and everything was exactly where he had left it. The plaid couch with the sunken middle cushion. The bookshelf he built himself, still full of paperbacks with cracked spines. The kitchen table where we used to play cards while he made hot chocolate too sweet to drink without laughing.
The paintings were still hanging on the walls. He painted every one of them himself. Landscapes mostly. The lake at sunrise. Birch trees in autumn. The old stone bridge two miles up the road.
They were not masterpieces.
They were his.
I set the suitcases down, sat on the couch, and something inside me cracked. Not the dramatic kind of break you see in movies. More like the sound an old house makes in the middle of the night, something settling, shifting, finding a new position.
I cried for three hours.
Then I found the fuse box, flipped the breakers, and the kitchen light flickered on. The cabin was cold. It was dusty. It was barely functional.
And it was mine.
It was the only thing in the world that was still mine.
Part 2
The first week was survival.
Not the romantic kind. Not the woman-finds-herself-in-nature kind. The ugly kind. The kind where you scrub mold off bathroom tiles at two in the morning because you cannot sleep and you need something to do with your hands.
The cabin had no heat. The water heater took twenty minutes to produce anything warmer than lukewarm. The nearest grocery store was a thirty-minute drive down a road with no cell signal for the first fifteen miles. I ate canned soup for four straight days because I was too scared to spend what little money I had.
On the third day, I called my mother.
She picked up on the sixth ring.
“I heard about the divorce,” she said.
There was no question about how I was doing. No offer to help. Just a statement, like she was confirming a weather report.
“I’m at Grandpa’s cabin,” I told her.
Silence.
