Mom’s letter explained everything. Using money from her own mother’s estate, she had bought the cabin and forty acres around it and placed them in a trust under my name. Her lawyer, Mr. Whitcomb, held the deed until my eighteenth birthday. The strongbox, opened with the key taped to her letter, held a deed copy, a bank box key, thirty thousand dollars in savings bonds, and copies of her cassettes. She wrote that she knew Dad’s weakness for pleasing people, and wanted me to have one place no one could take away.

The rest made sense instantly. Mr. Whitcomb had called Dad that morning, as Mom instructed, to confirm I had received the deed. That call told them the land bordered a new ski resort, and a developer wanted it for three hundred eighty thousand dollars. They had thought the cabin worthless. Now Diane stood on my porch, smiling, asking me to sign a paper handing it to Dad to keep it in the family. I opened the door a crack and held up the deed. “It was never yours to give,” I said.

Dad stood behind Diane, staring at the snow. When I read him the last line of Mom’s letter, where she asked him to forgive her for not trusting him, his shoulders shook. He walked to the trunk and handed me my phone, my car keys, my savings, and the box of Mom’s things, saying he was ashamed. Diane screamed that it was a trick, but I told her the lawyer would arrive by morning. She went back to the car.

Mr. Whitcomb came at sunrise with a deputy, and a court order kept Diane off the property. Dad moved into an apartment alone and visited every Sunday, waiting outside until I invited him in. I turned down the developer, took Rusty to a vet in town for his leg, and spent the winter listening to Mom’s cassettes. The little glass bird sits by the window now. For the first time in my life, I was not waiting for anyone to rescue me.