“Yes.”
She looked pleased.
I kept reading.
Claire wrote that during the final year before her diagnosis, she had become involved with Franklin Community Center.
There she met Maya, then thirteen.
Maya was brilliant at mathematics but had started missing enrichment programs because her family had moved twice.
Claire helped her apply to Northbridge.
But the experience showed Claire something she had never considered.
Scholarships often paid tuition.
They did not always solve transportation.
Uniforms.
Activity fees.
Technology.
Changes of address.
Temporary housing.
The hundred small obstacles that could turn an opportunity into something impossible to hold.
Claire had wanted to establish what she called a Continuity Fund.
Not a scholarship.
A support structure.
Something designed to help already-admitted students remain in programs when ordinary family instability interrupted their education.
Then she became ill.
Her letter continued.
I could have finished this without you.
I had enough personal assets.
Arthur could have established a small fund.
But I decided not to.
That sentence annoyed me instantly.
Even dead, Claire had a talent for making me argue with paper.
She explained why.
Because the fund was not really the unfinished thing.
You are.
I stopped reading.
Sophie watched me.
“Bad?”
“No.”
“Sad?”
I considered.
“Accurate.”
I continued.
Claire wrote that she had spent years watching me turn love into provision.
A better home.
A better school.
Better vacations.
Better doctors.
A larger college account.
Everything measurable.
Everything secure.
You love by building walls against uncertainty, she wrote.
I love that about you.
But Sophie cannot live inside a wall.
She needs a father who sometimes sits on the floor.
I stared at the sentence until the words blurred slightly.
There was no accusation in it.
That somehow made it harder.
Near the end, Claire explained the condition involving Maya.
If I ever encountered Maya naturally, asked who she was, listened long enough to discover the problem, and contacted Arthur myself, then Claire wanted me to decide whether the Continuity Fund should exist.
Not because she had ordered it.
Because I had finally seen the need.
The final paragraph was shorter.
If Sophie is beside you, ask her what she wants.
Not what I wanted for her.
Not what you planned.
What she wants.
She is going to become someone neither of us gets to design.
Please let her.
I lowered the letter.
Outside the window, morning traffic moved beside the river.
