I should tell you about my family, so the rest of this makes sense.

My mother died when I was seven. A car accident on an icy road. I remember her laugh, and the way she sang along to the radio in the car, always getting the words wrong on purpose to make me giggle. I remember her blue winter coat. That’s about it.

After she died, it was just me and Dad for five years.

He wasn’t a warm man, even then. He worked long hours as a manager at a company downtown. He came home late and ate dinner in front of the TV. He didn’t hug much. He didn’t talk much. But he was there.

When I was twelve, he married Carla. She had a son, Ethan, one year older than me. They moved into our house, into my mother’s old sewing room, and everything changed.

Ethan got the bigger bedroom. Ethan got the new clothes. Ethan got a car for his sixteenth birthday. When I turned sixteen, I got a card from Carla with twenty dollars in it and a note that said Happy birthday! Maybe start saving for your own car.

So I did.

I asked about my grandparents once. I was nine. My friend Tyler had gone to his grandpa’s farm for the weekend, and I wanted to know why I didn’t have a grandpa with a farm.

“Your mom’s parents died before you were born,” Dad said. “So did mine.”

“What was your dad like?”

Dad’s face went hard.

“He’s dead, Nathan,” he said. “That’s all you need to know about him.”

I never asked again.

There were no photographs of him in our house. No birthday cards. No phone calls. No family visits. Nothing that ever gave me any reason to think my father was lying.

For the next nine days, my car was my bedroom, my closet, and the only private space I had in the world.

I kept going to school. Pretending everything was normal felt easier than explaining the truth. I got up before sunrise and drove to the high school and showered in the locker room before anybody else got there. I wore the same two pairs of jeans over and over. I joked around with my friends in the hallway, and none of them had any idea where I slept.

Food became something I calculated instead of something I enjoyed.

I had forty-one dollars in my wallet, and that was it. I ate half my school lunch and wrapped the other half in a napkin for dinner. I bought the cheapest gas I could find, five dollars at a time. After school, I drove around looking for quiet parking lots and side streets where nobody would notice a teenager sleeping in an old Honda.

The Walmart parking lot was good for a few nights, until a security guard knocked on my window at two in the morning. The lot behind the public library worked for three nights. A church parking lot on Grove Street worked for one.

I slept with my seat tipped back and my gray hoodie bunched up under my head. It was March. It got down into the thirties at night. I’d wake up at three in the morning shivering, run the engine for ten minutes to get warm, then turn it off to save gas.

I didn’t tell anybody. Not my friends. Not my teachers. Not my boss at Kessler’s. I was too ashamed.

By the ninth day, my gas tank was almost empty.

I had six dollars left in my wallet.

I was driving down Fifth Street after school, looking for somewhere to park for the night, when the car made a horrible grinding noise and the engine just stopped. The check engine light was flashing. The dashboard went dark.

I managed to coast it into the alley behind a row of restaurants downtown. I squeezed it in between a dumpster and a delivery truck behind a diner called Ray’s.

Then I sat there behind the steering wheel for almost an hour.

I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have money for a tow. I didn’t have money for a mechanic. I didn’t have money for anything.

I hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before.

Eventually, hunger was stronger than embarrassment.

I got out of the car and walked toward the back door of Ray’s Diner.

There were three big black trash bags sitting by the dumpster. I’d seen the kitchen guys throw them out earlier. I was hoping somebody had thrown away bread. A sandwich. French fries. Anything I could safely eat.

I’d never done this before. I want you to know that. I stood there in front of those trash bags with my hands shaking, telling myself it was fine, nobody would see, people did this all the time.

I reached for the first bag.

That’s when somebody behind me said my name.

“Are you Nathan Brooks?”

I froze with my hand on the trash bag.

I turned around slowly.

A man was standing at the end of the alley. He looked completely out of place. He was maybe sixty, with silver hair and a perfectly tailored charcoal suit. His shoes were black and so shiny they reflected the light from the diner’s back door. He was carrying a brown leather briefcase that probably cost more than my entire car.

My face went hot. He’d seen me. He’d seen me reaching into the trash.

“Who wants to know?” I said.

He walked toward me. He reached into his jacket pocket and handed me a business card.

Richard Hartwell. Hartwell & Associates. Attorney at Law.

“I’ve been searching for you, Nathan,” he said.

Nobody had ever said those words to me before. Not once in my whole life.

“Searching for me? Why?”

“I represent the estate of James Brooks,” Richard said.

I stared at him.

“James Brooks,” I said slowly.

“Your grandfather.”

I almost laughed. It came out like a cough.

“My grandfather died before I was born,” I said.

Richard’s expression changed. It went very serious and very gentle at the same time.

“That isn’t true, Nathan,” he said. “James Brooks died three weeks ago. On February twenty-sixth. He was eighty-one years old.”