The Sherwood trust itself passed to me in full, exactly as Constance Sherwood had written it decades earlier, precisely as Adeline had quietly, deliberately made sure it would.
I didn’t feel like celebrating when the final paperwork cleared. Mostly, I felt like I’d spent five months fighting a legal battle on behalf of a woman who couldn’t see how it ended, over money I would have traded back in a heartbeat for one more ordinary Tuesday with her.
It took me the better part of a year to decide what to actually do with all of it.
I kept enough to stay comfortable, to finally stop counting every grocery receipt the way we’d both learned to during the worst stretches of her treatment. The rest, I put toward something I thought Adeline would have actually wanted her grandmother’s money attached to — a research grant, established in her name, funding early-stage studies into the specific autoimmune disorder that had taken her from me at twenty-nine.
Dr. Iyer helped me set it up properly, connecting me with two research teams who’d been chronically underfunded for years, working on exactly the kind of early detection methods that might have changed Adeline’s own timeline, had they existed a decade earlier.
I still call it, in my head if nowhere else official, the Advil Fund.
I think she would have found that both extremely funny and exactly right.
