“Eleanor knew that,” another said. “But she still treated him kindly.”
I pretended not to hear.
But I heard every word.
And every word felt deserved.
After the funeral, Eleanor’s attorney called me to his office.
I sat across from urm him and tried to remain calm.
But inside, I had already begun counting everything.
The house.
The money.
A secure life.
Finally, I thought, I would crawl out of the pit I had thrown myself into.
The attorney opened Eleanor’s will.
And from the very first minute, I understood that nothing was going to happen the way I had imagined.
Continuation in the comments
The house had been left to Eleanor’s niece.
Most of the money had been donated to a charity foundation.
Some went to the hospital.
Some went to the church where Eleanor had spent years helping lonely people.
Nothing had been left to me.
No house.
No money.
No car.
Not one dollar.
I felt anger rising inside me.
And even in that moment, I was still selfish enough that my first pain was not the loss of Eleanor.
It was the realization that I had received nothing.
“So she left me nothing?” I asked.
The attorney looked at me for a long moment.
Then he reached beneath the table, took out an old wooden box, and placed it in front of me.
My name was written across the lid in Eleanor’s delicate handwriting.
For Nathan.
I laughed bitterly.
“This is all she left me?”
The attorney answered calmly:
“Eleanor said this is what you truly wanted.”
I did not understand.
I opened the box.
The first thing inside was a photograph.
It showed my old car parked behind the supermarket.
I was asleep inside it.
On the back of the photograph, Eleanor had written:
“That night, I saw you for the first time. You did not see me, but I saw you. And I did not see a bad man. I saw a boy whom life had broken too much.”
My breath caught.
There were other things inside the box too.
