When Ellie’s blind, dying grandfather gathers the greedy family to announce he’s donating his fortune to charity, tension explodes. The open safe tempts everyone. As relatives enter the room one by one, Ellie suspects foul play.
But when it’s her turn, Grandpa reveals a shocking truth.
At 19, I was the black sheep of a family that treated me like I was invisible. After Mom died, Dad married Sharon, who came complete with two daughters and had enough emotional baggage to sink a cruise ship.
The way they looked at me — like I was something they’d scraped off their shoes — made our spacious home feel smaller than a closet.
Their matching designer outfits and perfectly styled hair only emphasized how much I didn’t belong, with my thrift store clothes and messy ponytail.
“Ellie, dear,” Sharon would say, her voice dripping with fake sweetness, “wouldn’t you be more comfortable eating in the kitchen?”
That was her way of saying I embarrassed her in front of her country club friends. Dad would just stare at his plate, suddenly fascinated by his roasted asparagus.
My cousins weren’t any better.
All six of them treated family gatherings like networking events, schmoozing with anyone who might boost their social status.
I usually ended up in the kitchen, helping the staff clean up. At least they talked to me like I was human. Maria, our cook, always saved me a piece of her famous chocolate cake.
“Those people out there?” she’d say, sliding me an extra-large slice.
“They don’t know what they’re missing.”
But Grandpa? He was different. He’d worked his way up from nothing to build the family fortune, but being wealthy never changed him.
Grandpa was salt of the earth, through and through.
He was the only one in the family who saw me for who I really was when everyone else looked right through me.
Grandpa taught me everything worth knowing, from how to plant the perfect rose garden to how to laugh when life kicks you in the teeth.
While the rest of the family was busy climbing their social ladders, Grandpa and I would sit on his wraparound porch, drinking lemonade and talking about everything and nothing.
“Remember, Ellie,” he’d say when I was having a rough day, “the best revenge is living well. And maybe a little practical joke now and then.”
I didn’t fully understand what he meant until that summer, when everything changed.
Grandpa got sick, and his health deteriorated fast. His eyesight failed, and suddenly he was bedridden.
The family descended like locusts, their concern as fake as Sharon’s designer handbags.
I visited him every day, watching as he grew weaker, my heart breaking a little more each time. While the others whispered about his massive wall safe and what might be inside it, I just held his hand and read him his favorite books.
We worked our way through “The Count of Monte Cristo” at his request, which should have been my first clue about what was coming.
“Read that part again,” he’d say, “where Edmund discovers the treasure.”
Now I wonder if he was trying not to laugh.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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