The word grandson struck me like a sudden gust of wind because Grant had never mentioned having a child during his life, yet Daniel quickly explained that his mother had confessed the truth shortly before her death from cancer the previous year. She told him that the man who raised him was not his biological father and that the real man responsible for his birth was Grant Halvorsen whom she had met during a summer job at a marina along the northern shore of Lake Michigan more than two decades earlier. Daniel said that curiosity drove him to contact Grant’s former fiancée, a woman named Cynthia Dalton, who invited him to visit her home in Chicago where she promised to share belongings that once belonged to my son.
The visit began politely but quickly turned unsettling because Cynthia and her brother Harold Dalton asked repeated questions about documents, letters, and information Daniel might possess concerning Grant’s past.