PART 10
I keep his letter in the drawer of my nightstand now, read through so many times the folds have started to soften at the edges.
This was my plan, he wrote, near the very end of it. Now I have to tell you the truth, because I’m not here anymore to keep managing it quietly on my own the way I always did. I hope, wherever you are reading this, that you can forgive an old man for one last piece of stubbornness — the same stubbornness that kept this roof over both our heads for sixty-nine years, whether you ever fully realized it or not.
I loved you completely, Marguerite, every single day of it. The empty line on that will was never about what I actually left you. It was the last, clumsy way I knew how to make sure nothing and no one could ever come between you and everything I’d spent a lifetime quietly building for you to have.
