I asked you to marry me because I am a selfish old man who wanted, before he died, to be able to say that he had done one openly good thing for the girl he had wronged. I wanted to give you something, legally and truly and in the light, instead of always in the dark. I could not tell you who I was, because you would have refused me, and rightly. So I asked you as a stranger, and you gave a dying man his last wish, and you will never know how much it meant that you said yes.
Everything I have is yours now. It is not a fortune, but it is enough. The lawyer will explain. I have spent my life sending you money in secret, and now I can finally send it to you in the open, with my name on it, which is the only thing I have ever wanted. There is a house, paid for, in a town by the water where I always hoped you might one day be happy. There is enough set aside that you will never again lie awake at night doing the arithmetic of survival, the way I know you did as a girl, the way I could never quite protect you from.
I know that what I have told you may make you hate me. I have made my peace with that. You are entitled to your anger, and if you choose to curse my name, I will have earned it a thousand times over. But I hope, though I have no right to hope, that in time you might come to understand that the man you spent these last weeks with, the man who laughed with you over tea and cried when you told him what your mother used to sing, was real. That was not a performance. That was the truest and happiest I have been in thirty-one years. You gave a dying man not just his last wish but the only peace he has ever known. Whatever I stole from you, you gave me back, in these last few weeks, more than I could ever have deserved.
