The day Richard’s lawyer came to my door, I thought he had come to tell me how much money my husband had left me.
I was wrong.
“Richard left you nothing,” the lawyer said.
For a moment, I couldn’t breathe.
I stared at the man standing in my doorway, his leather briefcase resting beside his leg.
“Nothing?”
He nodded.
My hands began to tremble.
Five years earlier, I had married a seventy-two-year-old millionaire while I was a thirty-five-year-old widow drowning in debt and trying desperately to keep a roof over my daughter’s head.
For five years, I had wondered why a man like Richard had chosen a woman like me.
He never asked me to repay him.
He never treated me like a charity case.
He never demanded that I become someone I wasn’t.
He loved my daughter, Emily, as if she were his own.
And now he was dead.
I had expected grief.
I hadn’t expected this.
“You’re telling me Richard left me nothing?”
“That’s what his will says.”
I lowered myself into the nearest chair.
My mind raced through the years we had spent together.
The house.
The garden.
The mornings when I brought him coffee.
The nights when I sat beside him while his breathing became difficult.
The little jokes.
The arguments.
The quiet conversations.
Had all of it meant something different to him?
Had I been nothing more than a woman he rescued because he felt sorry for her?
The lawyer watched me silently.
Then he opened his briefcase.
“But there’s something else.”
He placed an old photograph on my kitchen table.
It was faded and slightly torn along one edge.
I picked it up.
A young man stood outside a brick building.
He was smiling.
In his arms was a little girl.
She couldn’t have been more than five years old.
Her hair was tangled.
Her dress was too large.
Her arms were wrapped tightly around the man’s neck.
I looked at the man’s face.
Even though he was decades younger, I knew him immediately.
Richard.
My eyes moved back to the little girl.
My heart stopped.
Because I knew her too.
I was looking at myself.
“What is this?” I whispered.
The lawyer leaned forward.
“Richard wanted you to see it after he was gone.”
I turned the photograph over.
There was a date written on the back.
