UNCLE HAROLD’S ESTATE

I’m Diana Meyers, twenty-eight years old, Chief Financial Officer of Meyers Property Holdings — one of the largest commercial real estate firms in the Pacific Northwest, headquartered on the 42nd floor of a building overlooking Elliott Bay in Seattle.

I’m at my desk by seven every morning, before even my own assistant, three spreadsheets open at once and a cup of green tea slowly going cold beside me.

No one at the company knows much about my past, beyond the fact that I’m the niece Harold Meyers — the founder, and Chairman of the Board — adopted when I was fifteen.

What they see is a young woman disciplined to the point of being nearly merciless with herself, always the first to arrive and the last to leave, someone who hasn’t been late to a single meeting in six years.

What they don’t know is that there was a stretch of my life when I was a thirteen-year-old girl standing on the sidewalk outside my own house, with a suitcase, and nowhere to go.