I’m not sure it needs to.
I sat with that for a long moment.
The car quiet around me.
I proposed the marriage myself.
He said no, twice, before I finally convinced him.
He was terrified of exactly what you assumed the moment you walked into my kitchen.
That people would look at him and see a young man circling an old woman’s house.
I made him agree to a prenuptial agreement before I’d let him say yes.
He didn’t want it.
I insisted.
I told him it was the only way I’d ever be able to give him what I actually wanted to give him.
Not money.
Time.
Without anyone questioning why he was spending it on me.
I understood, reading that, exactly why Daniel had never once, in eight months, mentioned any of this to me.
He’d let me believe the worst about him.
Rather than explain a story that clearly still belonged, in some way, to my grandmother’s discretion.
Not his own.
The house goes to you because it always belonged to this family.
And because Daniel would have refused it regardless of what I put in writing.
He told me once that taking anything from me would feel like taking payment for loving someone.
He wasn’t willing to let anyone ever mistake the two.
There’s one more thing.
The medical bills from my last two hospital stays were paid in full before I died.
Not by insurance.
Daniel used almost everything he’d saved toward a down payment on his own house.
To cover what my coverage didn’t reach.
He doesn’t know I know that.
He asked the billing office not to tell me.
I found out anyway.
I always find out, sweetheart.
You know that about me.
I put the letter down for a moment.
My hands pressed flat against the steering wheel.
Trying to reconcile eight months of quiet suspicion with the man that letter described.
I am not asking you to love him the way I did.
