“Nathan, wash your hands. Dinner is ready,” she would say gently.
I would sit down, eat, and often not even say thank you.
One day, she noticed that my shoes were torn.
The next evening, there was a new pair waiting by the door.
“You needed them,” she said.
“Yeah. They’re nice,” I replied.
And that was all.
I did not hug her.
I did not thank her properly.
I did not even stop to think that the woman I was using was still trying to take care of me.
That winter, she bought me a new coat.
“Don’t go outside dressed like that,” she told me. “You’ll freeze.”
And inside, I thought:
“I don’t need your coat, Eleanor. I need your house.”
That was who I really was.
I looked at her medicine and thought not about her pain, but about my future.
Whenever she went to the doctor, I would ask:
“Is everything okay?”
But deep inside, part of me was only wondering how much longer I would have to wait.
I know this is unpleasant to read.
But it is even more unpleasant to look back at your own life and realize that the monster was never someone else.
The monster was you.
Then, one morning, Eleanor fell in the kitchen.
Her coffee cup slipped urm from her hand and shattered across the floor.
And for the first time, I truly felt afraid.
Not for the house.
Not for the money.
Not for the will.
For one brief moment, I saw Eleanor not as an opportunity, but as a person.
A person who had quietly cared for me for years.
She stayed in the hospital for three days.
On the third day, the doctor walked out of her room, looked at me, and said the words I had once imagined hearing countless times.
But when I finally heard them, something inside me went completely empty.
Eleanor had died.
At the funeral, her relatives looked at me as though they could read every thought I had ever had.
“He was only with her for the money,” one of them whispered.
