“We’ll talk soon.”
“May I come in?”
I stepped aside. He set the box on my living room table and folded his hands.
“Thomas asked me to deliver this the day after his funeral. Not before. I’ve also sent Raymond a formal letter this morning, notifying him, as your next of kin, that your affairs are under a trust. He’ll have it by noon.”
“What?” I asked.
Walter smiled. “Thomas was right. You finally walked right into his trap.”
“May I come in?”
I sat. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
Walter drew a folded page from his jacket pocket. “Thomas left instructions I’m to read exactly as he wrote them.”
The lawyer smoothed the page and read gently, in a voice not quite his own.
“‘My darling Nancy, forgive me, but I set a trap, and you were never meant to be the one caught in it.'”
My breath caught. I gripped the edge of the table.
My hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
Walter looked up.
“Those papers you signed at the wedding did more than accept what Thomas left you. One was a new will naming a discretionary trust I administer, funded entirely by Thomas’s estate for your support. Another was a durable power of attorney. You named me, not Raymond, to speak for your affairs if you ever couldn’t.”
The lawyer cleared his throat before continuing.
“One was a new will.”
“And the third was your acceptance of the trust’s terms. Raymond cannot pressure you into signing anything binding again, Nancy. Any document touching your money or your care runs through me first, at your request. That was Thomas’s trap. A ring of lawyers around you, so no one like Raymond can ever slide a page under your hand.”
Then he slid the box across the table toward me while my hands shook.
The wood was smooth under my fingers. There was a small brass latch.
“That was Thomas’s trap.”
I thought of Raymond’s cold smile at the graveside. I thought of Thomas’s shining eyes.
I lifted the lid.
And what I saw inside made me gasp!
I pressed my hand to my mouth and sobbed.
Inside sat a folded deed to Thomas’s family home, trust documents in my name, and a thick stack of letters tied with twine. Fifty-five of them. One for every year he hadn’t written, every year until the one that finally brought me back to him.
I lifted the lid.
On top lay a handwritten note in his careful script.
I looked up at Walter, my throat tight, tears sliding down my cheeks.
“I don’t understand.”
“Read it, Nancy. He wanted you to hear it in his own words.”
Thomas had written that Aunt Margaret had been a customer at his father’s hardware store for 40 years, and a friend besides.
“I don’t understand.”
He’d tried to warn her about Raymond siphoning money from her accounts when he let it spill by mistake, but she wouldn’t hear a word against her nephew. When she passed, and Raymond walked away richer, Thomas had kept watching him.
So when he learned I’d moved back and taken the nursing job, with Raymond hovering close, he asked to be transferred to my ward.
“He knew,” I whispered. “He knew what Raymond was planning to do to me?”
He’d tried to warn her.
“He did. That’s why the wedding happened when it did, why I was there, and why he asked you to sign those papers.”
I pressed the note to my chest. I hadn’t said his name out loud in years, and now it was the only name that mattered.
“The trap wasn’t for me.”
“No, Nancy. It was for Raymond. Thomas made you his legal wife so no one could ever touch what he left you. It’s ironclad.”
I pressed the note to my chest.
***
Raymond came pounding on my door three days later, red-faced, waving threats about lawyers and undue influence.
Walter, who visited often, happened to be sitting at my kitchen table with tea.
“Every document is airtight,” my lawyer told Raymond calmly. “Contest it if you’d like. You’ll lose, and you’ll pay the fees.”
My cousin stared at me as if he were seeing a stranger.
“You foolish old woman!”
“Every document is airtight.”
“No, Raymond. I’m a woman who was loved. There’s a difference.”
He left without another word.
***
