Inheritance drama is never fun, especially when you end up with what looks like the worst deal. After Grandma passed, my cousins divided up her house and car while I was left with her ancient, sagging sofa. The jokes wrote themselves—until they didn’t.
The furniture restorer I took it to actually winced when he saw it. “This might be the worst couch I’ve ever seen,” he admitted. “It’s not even worth the cost of repairs.” But I couldn’t let it go—not just because it was Grandma’s, but because I had a strange feeling about it.
Twenty-four hours later, the restorer called me, sounding like he’d just won the lottery. “Get down here right now,” he insisted. When I arrived, he pointed to the couch’s guts—and the stacks of hundred-dollar bills and gold coins spilling out. $340,000 in total, hidden where only someone crazy enough to repair the couch would find it.
Grandma had always been the mischievous type, and this was her masterpiece. While the rest of the family fought over the obvious assets, she’d left me the real treasure—along with the perfect lesson about looking beyond surface value. That ugly old couch turned out to be the greatest gift of all.
