PART 1
Three weeks after my husband, Lucas Gallagher, died in a highway collision outside Syracuse, New York, I was still sleeping with one of his T-shirts folded beneath my pillow.
I was eight months pregnant, and grief had made the days blur together into a fog. There was only one thing I knew with absolute certainty, which was that the house belonged to me.
Lucas had bought the home before we married, but after our second anniversary, he added my name to the legal deed. We had lived in that house together for six years, building our entire life within those walls.
Apparently, my father had never bothered to learn any of those details.
Charles Baldwin showed up on a gray Tuesday morning with his new wife, Courtney. She was twenty-four years old, which made her two years younger than my youngest cousin and thirty-two years younger than my father.
They did not bother to knock on the front door.
