It was given to me through his will. His small cottage in the middle of a large field of flowers. He asked me one time what I wanted the most, and I said, “Inspiration to write the greatest story in the world.” How could I have known that I would be the only to learn his secrets? That he never truly loved Grandma? That the present he would give me was his lie of a life? It is the best and worst present. In the world of writers and readers, it is the best; in our society of increasingly suicidal children, it is the worst.

The cottage was the only thing he kept secret from everyone. Not even his own wife knew about it until she read about it in his will.

My grandfather was a hardworking man. He would show his passion for his work by pushing himself to his hardest in every way. Like me, he too was a writer. He wrote poems, short stories, novels--none of which he ever published. I always wondered why, when he would write with such vigor. When every line of his writing grasped at me and pulled me in. When his words stabbed at my heart or licked my bones. And when I asked, I didn’t believe him. “The writing is for one person only,” he’d said. “Right now, it’s for you, not for anyone else.”

I walked into the small cottage the day after his funeral remembering all the moments I’d spent with him learning prose, reading, studying. Writing. On the door he had stapled a note: “Everything is for one person only.” Everything? I had thought. The cottage and the plot of land it stands on has been paid off for years now. It’s worth billions right now, and I thought at the time that it was so sweet that he kept it for that one person--who I assumed was his wife.

How wrong I was.