“Not some sensible condo you’ll secretly hate living in. Buy the stupid old house with the porch you’ve been talking about since the week we met. Fix the floors. Get the dog I always said we couldn’t have, because I was allergic. Take the next job if a good one comes along. Go somewhere that doesn’t have a hospital cafeteria attached to it.”
I laughed through the tears now, helplessly.
“And please, for the love of everything, eat something that isn’t instant ramen.”
I looked down. The packet was still sitting in my hand. That detail nearly finished me off completely. Silas laughed softly too, on his end. “She knew you.”
“Yeah. She really did.”
He read the final paragraph. “I said no every single time you proposed, because I genuinely thought refusing you was how I protected you. Then I finally realized I’d spent years deciding, on your behalf, which sacrifices you were allowed to make for me — the exact same way you spent years deciding which sacrifices were worth making for me. We were both impossibly stubborn about it. You were just louder.”
I wiped my face.
“So yes — I wanted to die as your wife. That part was completely true. It’s the truest thing I’ve ever wanted in my whole life. But I also wanted my last real decision to give something back to the man who’d already given me everything he possibly could.”
Silas’s own voice cracked slightly on the next line.
“Six days isn’t much of a marriage, Emmett. But you were my family long before anybody signed a piece of paper making it official. Use what I’ve left you to build the life I couldn’t stay long enough to have with you. That isn’t abandoning me. That’s taking me with you somewhere better than here.”
Then one final line.
“I love you. I’m sorry. And yes — Margarine still isn’t funny.”
Silas stopped reading. Neither of us spoke for a long moment. “There’s more legal language after this,” he finally said, gently, “but that’s the part she wanted you to actually hear.”
Epilogue
I stared at that ramen packet a long time. Then I threw it across the kitchen — not because of the ramen itself, but because she’d planned all of it. The appointment with Silas. The will. The marriage itself. She’d been lying in a hospital bed, preparing for surgery that might genuinely kill her, and somehow she’d still been quietly thinking about whether I’d ever actually buy a house.
I was furious with her for days afterward. Grief does strange, disorienting things to anger.
I yelled at her while driving alone in the car. Argued with her out loud in the shower. “You should have told me!” Silence, obviously. “You don’t get to decide what’s best for me!” More silence. Then I’d remember, every time, that she’d said essentially that exact same thing about me, for years, and mean it just as much.
Eventually I understood the whole shape of it properly. Marguerite hadn’t hidden a fortune away while I struggled beside her. Most of that money had genuinely never been available to either of us at all. The part that finally mattered only became mine because I’d become her husband, six days before the end. She hadn’t married me to make me rich. She’d married me because, for the very first time in four years, becoming my wife no longer felt to her like leaving me buried under one more burden.
