I hope Daniel’s firm is doing well. I hope you’re happy. But there’s no room in my life for someone who left me in the dust and came back for the mineral rights.
That’s not love, Chloe. It’s prospecting.
And I’ve learned the hard way to tell the difference between someone who values the ground I stand on and someone who just wants what’s under it.”
I hung up. She called back. I didn’t answer. Daniel, I heard, was long gone from her life by then — his “stable firm” had turned out to be more leveraged than solid, and Chloe had discovered that a man’s car is not the same as a man’s character, a lesson I could have taught her for free two years earlier.
Chapter 5: The Land I Bought Back
That was four years ago.
I run a mining and geological company now — a good one, built on my father’s land, bearing my father’s name. I’m wealthy, in the real and quiet way my father would have wanted, and I’ve never once let it change the man that hauling concrete blocks made me. I still know exactly what a day of honest labor is worth, because I did it, and I treat every person who works for me the way I wished I’d been treated when I was the man with poverty written on his face.
My mother never wants for anything again. That’s the first thing the fortune did — the woman who struggled to keep me fed through school lives in comfort now, in a house I built her, on land in the county where we come from. My father couldn’t give her that. I could, because of the land he sold and the education it bought and the fortune he never knew he was standing on. In a strange way, he gave it to her himself, thirty years too early, without knowing.
