Then, one gray Tuesday afternoon, Adeline’s family attorney called.
“I think you should sit down,” he told me, an older gentleman with a slow, careful Southern accent that made everything sound more serious than it probably needed to.
So I sat.
I mean, when a sad old lawyer tells you to sit down before reading your dead wife’s will over the phone, you sit down. That’s just how it works.
I perched on the edge of the kitchen counter, an unopened packet of instant ramen in one hand and my phone pressed to my ear with the other.
There was a long pause on his end.
Then he sighed.
“I suppose this explains why she wanted to marry you so badly, right at the end,” he said, with a sad, small chuckle that didn’t sound like it found any of this actually funny.
My stomach tightened. “What do you mean?”
I heard papers shifting on his end of the line.
“Here’s what she wrote,” he said quietly, and started to read.
The will itself was short — Adeline had never been one for excessive words, in writing or in person — but the attached trust documents Mr. Whitcomb walked me through afterward took up considerably more of his afternoon.
Adeline’s maternal grandmother, Constance Sherwood, had left a substantial trust behind when she died, years before I’d ever met Adeline. The language, according to Mr. Whitcomb, was unusually specific for an estate document: the full trust, worth several million dollars, would pass directly to Adeline’s legal spouse if she was married at the time of her death. If she wasn’t, it would instead revert entirely to the Sherwood Family Foundation, a charitable organization run almost exclusively by Adeline’s aunt, Beatrice.
