Her competency was documented.
She met with me alone.
Two independent witnesses were present when she signed.”
The niece pushed the deed away as though it were contaminated.
“I’ll challenge it.”
“You may speak with your own counsel,” the attorney said.
“But you should review the remaining documents first.”
He removed a medical statement, a purchase contract, and a recorded declaration from the folder.
Each page had dates, signatures, and official seals.
Evelyn had built a wall around the transfer before anyone knew there was something to attack.
I returned to her letter.
She wrote about the first winter coat she bought me.
She had seen me standing by the door, struggling with the broken zipper of my old one.
When she offered the new coat, I barely looked up from my phone.
She wrote about the boots she placed beside my bed after mine split open.
She wrote about the dinners I ate without asking whether she had already eaten.
She did not soften any of it.
You were selfish, she wrote.
You were frightened.
Sometimes frightened people convince themselves those are the same thing.
My throat tightened.
I wanted her anger.
Anger would have been easier.
I wanted her to call me a liar and a thief.
Instead, she had described me accurately, without cruelty, and that precision hurt more than any accusation her relatives had thrown at me.
Then the letter changed.
Evelyn wrote about the loose railing behind the house.
I had repaired it one afternoon because I was afraid she would fall and die before changing the will.
That had been my reason, or at least the reason I admitted to myself.
But she remembered how I had sanded the wood smooth so it would not catch her sleeve.
She remembered that I had reinforced the bottom step without being asked.
She wrote about the night a storm knocked out the electricity.
I had sat with her in the kitchen until morning, feeding pieces of wood into the fireplace.
I told myself I stayed because I did not want the pipes to freeze.
She remembered that I kept placing the blanket back over her shoulders whenever it slipped.
She wrote about her last birthday.
I had forgotten to buy a present.
Ashamed, I repaired an old kitchen chair she had kept in the garage.
The chair had belonged to her mother.
I stripped the cracked finish, tightened the joints, and stained it the same dark color it had been in an old photograph.
When I gave it to Evelyn, she ran her fingers over the wood for a long time.
I had dismissed her reaction.
I thought she was being sentimental because she was old.
According to the letter, that chair was the reason she bought the workshop.
The property described in the deed was a neglected brick building that had once housed a furniture repair business.
The apartment upstairs was small, but the roof was sound.
The workshop needed cleaning, wiring, and new windows.
Evelyn had noticed that I became a different person when I was repairing something.
Quieter.
Patient.
Careful.
One evening, months before she died, she had asked me what I would choose if I no longer had to spend every day trying to survive.
I had shrugged and said I wanted a place nobody could throw me out of.
Then, after a long silence, I had added that I might like to fix furniture for a living.
I had forgotten the conversation.
She had not.
