That wasn’t an insult. It was just the kind of place Saint Mark’s had always been. Boys came in with plastic grocery bags full of clothes that didn’t fit, and they left with duffel bags, a handshake, and whatever hard edges the world had carved into them by then. Some got picked up by relatives. Some got picked up by trouble. Most just walked out.
I walked out with one duffel bag, a steel toolbox, eighty-seven dollars in cash, and an envelope that had my name typed on the front in clean black letters.
COLE HARPER. PERSONAL AND LEGAL.
I sat on the cracked concrete bench outside the orphanage and opened it with my thumb.
Inside was a letter from a probate attorney in Topeka, Kansas, informing me that my maternal grandmother, a woman I had never met and barely even known existed, had died three months earlier and left me her remaining property: six acres outside a town called Black Creek, a ruined well house, a collapsed root cellar, and a deed free and clear of debt.
No house.
No savings.
