In the wake of her father’s funeral in California, a little girl is cast out by her stepmother — but a rich attorney appears and reveals a buried inheritance.....The rain started the moment they lowered her father’s casket into the ground, as though the sky itself objected to his departure. Eight-year-old Emily Carter stood beside her stepmother, clutching a damp white rose, her small fingers trembling. She was too young to understand death, but old enough to feel the sharp absence that followed