“Eleanor knew it,” another replied. “And yet she was always good to him.”
I pretended not to listen to them.
But I heard every word.
And I felt like I deserved every single one of them.
After the funeral, Eleanor’s lawyer called me to his office. I sat in front of him and tried to appear calm.
But inside I was already making accounts.
The house.
The money.
A safe life.
Finally, I thought, I could get out of the hole I had gotten myself into.
The lawyer opened Eleanor’s will.
And from the very beginning I understood that nothing was going to happen as I had imagined.
The house had been left
Most of the money had been donated to a charity foundation.
Part was for the hospital.
Another part went to the church where Eleanor had spent years helping lonely people.
I hadn’t left anything.
Not even the house.
No money.
No car.
Not a single dollar.
I felt the anger start to grow inside me.
And until that moment I was still so selfish that my first pain was not to have lost Eleanor.
It was discovering that I hadn’t received anything.
“So… didn’t he leave me anything?” I asked.
The lawyer watched me for a few seconds.
Then he leaned over, pulled out an old wooden box from under the table and placed it in front of me.
On the lid was my name written with the delicate letter of Eleanor.
For Nathan.
I let out a bitter laugh.
“Is this all he left me?”
The
“Eleanor said this was what you really wanted.”
I didn’t understand what I meant.
I opened the box.
The first thing I found was a photograph.
It was my old car parked behind that supermarket.
I was asleep inside.
On the back of the photograph, Eleanor had written:
“That night I saw you for the first time. You didn’t see me, but I did see you. And I didn’t see a bad man. I saw a boy who had been broken too much by life.”
My breath was cut off.
There were more things inside the box.
A picture of my old broken shoes.
A button on the coat that I had thrown away one day.
And an envelope.
I opened it.
Inside were all the debt-related documents he had dragged away for years.
