I looked at him.
“What do you mean?”
“She was worried that if she told you who she was, you might think she’d been using you.”
I remembered the afternoon I’d proposed the wedding.
Eleanor had cried.
I’d assumed they were tears of happiness.
Now I wondered whether she’d been thinking about something else.
⸻
There was one more document in the envelope.
A copy of Eleanor’s will.
I almost didn’t open it.
I had no interest in her money.
The wedding hadn’t been about that.
But Martin asked me to read the final page.
Eleanor had left most of her estate to a hospice charity.
A smaller amount was set aside to cover Patricia’s remaining memorial expenses and maintain the family graves.
And there was one personal bequest.
Not money.
Not property.
A wooden box.
Inside were Patricia’s letters, photographs, and the original documents she’d kept from my childhood.
Eleanor had left them to me.
Along with a note.
I know people may assume that because you married me, I left you a fortune.
I’m sorry to disappoint them.
What I have left you is something I believe matters more.
The truth about where you came from.
And the chance to know someone who has been waiting a very long time to meet you again.
I closed the folder.
For years, I’d believed my family consisted of two people.
My mother and me.
Now I was learning that other people had been quietly protecting me, searching for me, and making difficult decisions about my life.
Some of those decisions had been wrong.
Some had been generous.
And some had been both.
⸻
I didn’t drive to Hendersonville that afternoon.
I needed time.
I went home and opened the old box of photographs I’d kept from my mother’s house.
