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My name is Althea, and this is not a story of inheritance, but of an inheritance of the heart. It began the day I became a daughter-in-law at twenty-six, stepping across the worn threshold of a farmhouse in the small, dusty town of San Francisco.
I was marrying into a family that had been weathered by hardship like an old tree battered by storms. My mother-in-law had been taken by illness far too young, leaving my father-in-law, a man named Bill Ernesto, to raise four children with nothing but the soil under his fingernails and a relentless will.
His entire life was a testament to the earth he tilled—a cycle of planting, praying for rain, and harvesting just enough to get by. He never had a job that offered a pension or the soft cushion of security. His wealth was in his children, a currency that, by the time I arrived, had severely devalued.
By the time I married his youngest son, most of Bill’s children had already built their own lives, brick by brick, far from the fading paint and creaking floors of their childhood home.
