“Now go and live the life that is waiting for you.
“All my love,
“Grandma.”
I read the letter twice.
Then I sat at the long oak table under the daylight lamp and did not move for a quarter of an hour.
Then I opened the will.
It was three pages, single-spaced, in my grandmother’s careful longhand.
It was signed at the bottom.
It was witnessed by Hattie Lockwood and Dr. Aldwin Pace.
It was notorized in Bowfort County by a notary named E. Riddle on October 4, 2007, with a raised seal still legible in the corner.
Item one: 14 Coral Lane, Tybee Island, Georgia, to Petra Witkim in fe simple.
Item two: $145,000 in U.S. Treasury bonds held under trust agreement with Aldwin Pace, to Petra Witam, payable on her 30th birthday or her wedding day, whichever comes first.
Item three: a small inventory of household goods.
China.
The Polaroid camera.
A wicker porch swing.
Three quilts to Petra Whitam.
There was no provision for anyone else.
Not for my mother.
Not for my father.
Not for Caroline.
My mother had told a 12-year-old me, in a black dress in a funeral home off East Bay, that everything her own mother had owned had gone to the mortgage and the medical bills.
That was a lie.
The mortgage on the Tybee cottage had been paid off in 1989, 18 years before my grandmother died.
She had nothing left to pay on it.
The medical bills, I would later learn from Owen Sloan, had been covered by my grandmother’s secondary insurance.
There was nothing for my mother to settle.
There was only a thing to take.
So she had taken it.
I made one phone call that night.
I called the number on the inside cover of the will.
A Savannah law firm called Pace and Sloan.
The after-hours voicemail picked up.
I said, “My name is Petra Witcom. My grandmother was Margaret Whitcom. I am calling about a 2007 will held by your firm. I would like to make an appointment for as soon as possible.”
I hung up.
12 minutes later, Owen Sloan called me back.
“Ms. Witcom,” he said.
He had a young voice.
He sounded as if he had been waiting for the call.
“My grandfather asked me, when I took the bar in 2019, to be ready for your call. We have been ready for 6 years. I can see you Monday morning.”
I did not sleep that night.
I sat at my kitchen counter with the 14 photographs spread out in front of me, and I watched the light come up over the river, and I let the child in those photographs come back into the room.
She was four years old.
She had flour on her face.
She had been called my love.
She had been kept by somebody.
By someone whose name nobody had said in our dining room since 2008.
Chapter 7: Building the case
I made coffee at 6:00.
I drove to Mercer’s campus in Mon at 7.
I bought my sister Carolina coffee in the law-school courtyard at 9.
She was studying for civil procedure.
She wore a sweater she had borrowed from our mother.
She had our mother’s mouth.
I left the coffee.
I left my keys on the table.
I stood up to go.
She said, “Petra, what is going on with you? You’re being weird.”
I said, “I’m not being weird. I’m being awake. I’ll see you at the wedding.”
When I hugged her goodbye, my hand brushed the back of her sweater and came away with three of her hairs.
I drove home with them in a clean glassene envelope on the passenger seat.
The DNA lab I chose was a small, family-owned forensic company in Atlanta called Ancestry Solve.
They handle a lot of probate disputes for estate lawyers in the Southeast.
They are accustomed to a certain kind of client.
I drove the samples up myself.
I did not want them in the mail.
I gave them three things.
One: a strand of my own hair, pulled from my own brush, in a sealed glassene envelope labeled Subject A.
Two: a single hair from the inside of my grandmother’s locket, the one Aunt Hattie had given me out of the wooden box.
My grandmother had kept a thin curl of her own hair coiled inside her locket since the year my mother was born.
I had verified the chemistry of the hair on my lab table the night before.
[Snorts.]
The cuticle was old enough.
The keratin profile matched a person born in the 1930s.
I labeled this envelope Reference G.
Three: the three strands I’d lifted from Caroline’s sweater in the law-school courtyard.
I labeled this envelope Subject C.
I paid in cash.
I gave them my private email.
I did not give them the Whitam name.
6 weeks later, the results came back in a PDF.
Subject A and Reference G: a 99.4% match for a grandmother-granddaughter relationship.
Subject A and Subject C: a 23% shared DNA match, consistent with half sisters sharing one parent.
The PDF did not have to tell me which parent.
I knew which parent.
I closed my laptop.
I called Theo.