She was sixty-nine. She had spent the last fourteen months of her life at the care facility where I worked as a student care assistant, and by the time she was buried, her children had already told half the town what I was. A gold digger. A boy who’d smelled an inheritance and gone after a lonely, dying woman.
What made it worse was that I couldn’t really blame anyone for believing them. I knew exactly how it looked.
But Eleanor had settled the money question long before anyone else raised it.
“You’re not getting a cent from me, James,” she’d told me. “Not one.”
“I don’t care,” I’d said. And I meant it.
So when her lawyer phoned me a few weeks after the funeral, my stomach dropped.
“Eleanor made an arrangement for you before she passed,” he said. “It isn’t part of her will. She asked me to explain it to you in person, and there’s a deadline coming up.”
I told him I’d be there the next morning.
