Nessa sat down on the floor and tore open the envelope, fully expecting to find some legal paper, but it was a handwritten letter from her grandmother. She recognized the perfect penmanship from the birthday cards she had received from Nanny Lucy through the years. “It’s a letter,” she whispered. “Are you sure you want me to read it out loud?”

“Maybe you’d rather do that with just you three . . . ,” Jackson said.

Nessa held up a palm in protest. Jackson was a part of this whether the two of them got things straightened out or not, and her heart told her that he should stay for the reading. “She trusted you to keep this thing, which is more than she trusted one of us, so you can hear what she has to say. Here goes.”

To my grandchildren,

If you have opened the hope chest, I’m dead and the quilt that I left for you is finished. Knowing Nessa and her neatness, I’m pretty sure she cleaned out the hall closet, and you’ve found my diary in the suitcase by now. I’ve been in the ground for a while, so I don’t care if you kids know about the O’Riley dirty laundry. Do with it what you will, but I do hope you are more honest with your children than I have been with you. It must have come as a shock to hear that your grandfather was a womanizer, that I had an affair with my best friend’s husband, and that Rachel didn’t belong to your grandfather. But you know all that by now, so there’s no need rehashing it in this letter.

Nessa laid the first page in her lap. “What if we hadn’t found her diary and all those papers?” Even after just one page, she felt even more numb than she had at Nanny Lucy’s funeral.

“Then you can bet your sweet soul we would be rushing over to the house to find it,” April said.

“We have all had our share of secrets,” Flynn said, “and no one is perfect.”

Nessa began to read the second page:

I thought about leaving all my money to you kids, but then that didn’t seem fair to my boys. Matthew would go through the inheritance like he does his women. Isaac might do something good with it, but I’ve been mad at him for a long time now. He tried to make Nessa marry a man of his choosing. When she didn’t bow to his wishes, he cut her off, and that didn’t set well with me. That went against the Christian values I thought he had. He might be a preacher, but he’s got a controlling streak like his father had, and I don’t want to give him a single dime.