Wordsmiths Fiction Week 4: The Family Secret
Greetings to All the Participants!!
As a chartered accountant working for one of the Fortune 500 companies, Julie was a pretty happy and successful young lady earning really well. But her past wasn’t worth making her really proud of. Her Father, Robert would never go well with her mother. Instead of being as an engaging person at home, he would rather stay quiet and would not allow anybody asking about his, his parents or even what kind of business he was doing to meet his home needs.
Julie vividly remembers that he would more often vanish for weeks saying that he was travelling to some other city for business reasons. Julie’s mother had no other choice but to accept and compromise with whatever was going on to ensure that Julie and her younger brother get elder enough to find some really good source of earning to meet the ends. Julie was good at studying and to her good luck she won fully funded scholarship for her chartered accountancy degree in the nearby College. She and her mother knew very less about her father’s very personal life as he would never like anyone asking such questions. After staying some odd ten years with Julie and her mother, he suddenly vanished without sharing any details about his next destination.
Alongside doing a waiter’s job in a nearby coffee shop, Julie did her Chartered Accountancy with distinction and started working with a renowned audit firm and both Julie and her mother started living happily.
It was a bright Sunday when she received a call from a lawyer that her father had died in a road accident near Baltimore and she should come to his office to read her father’s will. Shocked and saddened Julie went to lawyer’s office the next day and was stunned to see the details of her late father’s will.
The entire estate assets belonging to her father, Robert, were mentioned to be divided equally to his three children. Julie never expected that his father would ever be that kind to nominate her or her younger brother as his heirs for the estate assets other than perhaps his rusty guitar and couple of bookshelves filled with novels and history books. But the more shocking news for her was to know that his father had three children instead of two, the fact that he also concealed from her and her mother.
Will also stated that his father’s estate can’t be transferred to his children unless all of his three children would agree upon this transaction to happen.
The real challenge was not only to meet her 3rd sibling but to have him agreed to the property transfer to each one of them equally and amicably. The only information she could get about her step brother was the name and his post-office number and that’s all. This wasn’t good enough to trace him. Saddened and drained, she came back home with nothing but the only clue about his third brother’s P.O number.
Julie had a respectable job with sound earnings and had no lust or urgency to have her father’s estate assets divided. Actually she was excited to meet his step brother. Her curiosity led to an adventure that she still considers was worth doing.
She went to the nearby post office and asked a bit stupid question while pointing towards the Will of his father, “Can I have the home address of the Person named “Jeremy Cates” whose P.O. Box number is here?
“No, people book P.O. Box service only to keep their home or office address, hidden” the office replied while seeing her through his thick eye glasses. Ok, Julie replied in a bit disappointed way and left the post office in a bit hurry. She got back home and started thinking of some smart trick to identify and approach her step brother in a dramatic way. In her quest to this aim, she dispatched an obnoxious letter on her step brother’s P.O. Box number and reached the Post office exactly on the day when that letter was to be picked up by the recipient. To her pleasant surprise a boy aged around 21 came to the post office, opened the P.O. Box and picked up the “obnoxious” letter and quickly turned back to the exit gate. Julie shouted “Are you Mr Jeremy Cates?” He said yes!
Hiding the sheer excitement in her inner self, she introduced herself as his step sister and showed him the copy of their father’s Will. Jeremy was equally excited to meet her step sister and offered her to go to his home to have her met his mother Anne and sort out his deceased father’s Will. They sat together and agreed to meet the lawer to have their father’s estate divided among all three of them on following Thursday.
It was indeed a warm reunion between two extended families!!
In the end o would like to invite my Steemit fellows @josepha @anasuleidy and @mohammadfaisal for dropping thier creative participation. Thank you for supporting and valuable feedback.
Author
@uzma4882