made my throat close.
“Anna, I knew why you married me.”
I stopped reading.
Richard knew it.
The letter continued.
She wrote that from the beginning she understood that security had been part of the reason I agreed to marry him. He was seventy-three years old, he was no fool.
But then he wrote:
“What mattered to me was why you stayed after you didn’t have to.”
My eyes filled with tears.
During his final weeks, Richard had offered to transfer money in my name.
I refused.
I told him his kids would think I had been waiting for him to die.
He had even asked her to leave the family home to them.
I never knew he had told his lawyer about that conversation.
So I got to the last paragraph.
“My children will inherit my companies, my investments and the house in which they grew up. You never
tried to take those things away from them.”
Rebecca’s smile disappeared.
I looked at the brass key.
Finally, the lawyer spoke.
“Richard bought something six months before he got sick.”
He placed a document in front of me.
It was the deed to a small house by the lake.
I recognized the address immediately.
Richard and I had spent a weekend there once.
I had been standing on the porch and jokingly said:
“If I could choose any place to grow old, I would choose a place exactly like this.”
He had remembered it.
The house was mine.
Fully paid.
Then the lawyer turned another page.
There was also a trust, not the enormous fortune everyone expected me to fight for, but enough so that I would never again have to fear losing my home or choosing between paying rent or buying food.
Rebecca stared at me.
“So you get
