Then there was Noah.
Noah Bennett had been my best friend since sophomore year of high school.
He was the boy who helped me sneak out of my own disastrous seventeenth birthday party when my mother invited forty people I barely knew.
He was the person who drove six hours through a snowstorm when my college roommate disappeared for two days and I was terrified to stay alone.
He was the man who sat beside my grandmother’s hospital bed the night she died because my father said he “couldn’t handle hospitals.”
For years, Noah and I insisted we were just friends.
Then one night, after Blake canceled dinner with me for the third time in one week because of work, Noah and I were sitting on the floor of his tiny apartment eating Chinese takeout.
I complained that I was tired of feeling like an item on someone else’s calendar.
Noah stared at me for a long time.
Then he said quietly, “You know you don’t have to marry a life just because it looks impressive from the outside.”
I don’t know why that sentence broke something open inside me.
But it did.
Three months later, Blake proposed at a private restaurant in front of both our families.
I looked at the diamond.
Then at my mother’s excited face.
Then at my father.
And suddenly I realized I couldn’t breathe.
I said no.
By the end of the week, my relationship with Noah had changed forever.
By the end of the month, I was in love with him.
And now, nine months later, I was marrying him at a small lakeside chapel with twenty-three guests.
My mother called it humiliating.
My father called it irresponsible.
Blake never called me anything at all.
He simply stopped speaking to me.
Noah, meanwhile, arrived at the chapel in a navy suit he’d rented the day before because the one he owned no longer fit.
His truck had a cracked windshield.
His electrical business had barely survived its first year.
He had exactly $4,612 in savings.
I knew because we had sat at his kitchen table and shown each other everything before getting married.
Debt.
Income.
Credit scores.
Student loans.
Mistakes.
No secrets.
At least, that’s what I believed.
When I walked down the aisle, Noah looked at me like I was the only person in the world.
That was enough.
My parents left before dessert.
Three days later, everything changed.
It started with a key.
Noah and I were staying at his apartment until we could afford something larger.
We were eating cereal at seven in the morning when someone knocked on the door.
Noah looked at me.
“You expecting anybody?”
“No.”
He opened the door.
A woman in her late sixties stood in the hallway.
Gray hair.
Green coat.
Brown leather handbag.
She looked directly at me.
“Mia Hart?”
I stood.
“Yes?”
She reached into her purse and pulled out a small brass key attached to a faded blue tag.
The tag had one word written on it.
ELM.
My stomach tightened.
“What is that?”
The woman looked at Noah.
Then back at me.
“My name is Ruth Keller. I knew your grandmother.”
I stopped breathing.
My grandmother Evelyn had been dead for nearly eight years.
“What do you mean you knew her?”
“I was her bookkeeper for twenty-two years.”
I stared at her.
My grandmother had owned a modest catering company.
At least, that was what I had always been told.
After she died, my parents said she had very little left.
A small life insurance policy.
Some jewelry.
A few thousand dollars.
