“You knew what was in it?”
“Some of it,” he said. “Not all of it. She kept things from both of us, I think. Right up until the end.”
We sat there in silence for a while.
The evening cooling around us.
“I owe you an apology,” I said eventually. “A pretty significant one.”
“You don’t,” he said. “You were protecting her. I’d have done the same thing, in your position.”
“I probably did do the same thing, honestly, the first time I met her.”
“I assumed she was lonely and confused. Maybe being taken advantage of by someone else entirely.”
“Who?”
“Her financial advisor,” he said. “The one who kept steering her toward annuities that mostly benefited him.”
“I spent the first two months just trying to untangle that mess before I ever thought about anything else.”
I hadn’t known about that either.
There was, apparently, an entire year of my grandmother’s life I’d been too absent from to fully understand.
“She paid for your education,” I said. “I read that part.”
“She did,” he said. “I didn’t find out until I was already in nursing school.”
“My mother finally told me, once I was old enough that she thought I could handle knowing someone had been quietly watching over us for years.”
“Did that feel strange? Knowing a stranger had funded your whole life?”
“At first,” he admitted. “Then I met her, and it stopped feeling strange at all.”
“It just felt like the beginning of something that had actually started a long time before I understood it.”
I asked him about the medical bills eventually.
The part of the letter that had unsettled me the most.
He was quiet for a long moment before he answered.
“I wasn’t going to tell you that,” he said. “She wasn’t supposed to know either.”
“She knew everything, apparently.”
