“She deserves better than we had, Ellen. She’s smart enough for anything.”
Ellen had kissed the top of my head.
“Just don’t give her so much that she forgets to be grateful.”
I should have listened.
God, I should have listened.
The wedding receipts were in there too. $32,000 for one day. I told Caitlyn we could afford five,000, maybe eight if we stretched, but she’d cried, actually cried, about wanting her dream wedding. I’d worked weekends for six months installing hardwood floors for a contractor friend who paid me under the table.
“Daddy, you’re the best father in the world,” she’d whispered during our dance, her head on my shoulder, her wedding dress rustling against my rented tuxedo. “I’ll never forget this.”
But she had forgotten.
Just like she’d forgotten who co-signed her first car loan when her credit wasn’t good enough. Just like she’d forgotten who made the calls to get her that marketing job when she was unemployed for eight months after graduation.
I found the bank statements from two years ago, after Jeremy lost his financial adviser position for reasons they never fully explained. They’d moved in temporarily, just until Jeremy found something new. I’d never charged them rent. I’d paid the increased utility bills, bought groceries for three adults instead of one lonely widower.
“Roy’s like a father to me,” Jeremy had told his friends at their last barbecue, his arm around my shoulders. “I’m so lucky to have married into this family.”
I’d been proud, actually proud, to be the generous father-in-law, the man who took care of his family no matter what it cost him.
I walked upstairs to Ellen’s and my bedroom, still unchanged after two years. Her jewelry box sat on the dresser, her reading glasses folded beside the lamp. I opened the bottom drawer where I kept our important papers and pulled out our original house deed.
Roy and Ellen Hayes, purchased 1999. No liens, no co-signers, no complications. My name only now that Ellen was gone.
Standing there in the bedroom where Ellen had spent her last days, surrounded by everything we’d built together, I felt something shift inside me. The hurt was still there, sharp as broken glass. But underneath it, something harder was forming.
They wanted to put me away and sell my life’s work. They thought I was too old, too confused, too grateful for their attention to fight back.
I looked at Ellen’s photo on the nightstand, remembering her voice from all those years ago.
“Don’t give her so much that she forgets to be grateful.”
“Well, Ellen, our daughter had definitely forgotten, but she was about to remember that her old man wasn’t as helpless as she thought.”
I walked to my home office and pulled out the business card I’d kept in my desk drawer for three years.
Todd Fischer, real estate attorney.
Ellen had insisted we meet with him after her cancer diagnosis, just to make sure our affairs were in order.
