PART 5
I picked the letter back up.
So this is what I did, my love, and I need you to understand it came from love, not from any doubt about you. Two years ago, once I understood how serious my own health situation was becoming, I worked with Elias to move the substantial majority of our actual savings, our investments, the funds I always intended for you specifically, into an irrevocable trust in your name alone. It was fully executed and funded eighteen months before I ever wrote this letter, which means it sits entirely outside of my probate estate. It cannot be touched by any claim against my will, valid or otherwise, because legally, it was never part of my estate to begin with by the time I passed.
The will you heard read today, with its empty line next to your name, exists specifically so that if Roland’s collections firm — or Roland himself, for that matter — comes looking for something to claim against, they find a will with nothing meaningful left in it to fight over. Everything that actually matters is already safely, permanently yours, sitting in an account no court proceeding tied to that old debt can ever reach.
I’m sorry for the performance of that conference room today, Marguerite. I’m sorry you had to sit there, in front of our children, hearing a sentence designed to sound like I’d forgotten you. I promise you, of every decision I made in sixty-nine years of loving you, that one cost me the most to plan, and I only did it because I trusted you to eventually understand why.
I finally understood, sitting there, why Elias had asked everyone else to leave the room first.
