The lawyer placed Walter’s letter flat on the table.
“He addressed that as well.”
He resumed reading.
“My daughter wanted to end the arrangement once I discovered it.
I refused.
The young woman needed the income, and I needed someone who would sit in the quiet with me without treating me like a dying man.
I chose to continue.
From that day forward, no deception was being practiced upon me.
I was participating with full knowledge.”
The granddaughter laughed once, but there was no humor in it.
“So he felt sorry for her.”
The lawyer’s eyes remained on the page.
“At first, perhaps I did feel sorry for her,” he read in Walter’s voice.
“Then I began to respect her.”
My vision blurred.
Walter described the small things I had assumed he never noticed.
The afternoon I stayed two hours beyond the agreed visit because his breathing sounded wrong.
The Tuesday evening I came to the hospital even though Sunday had already passed.
The time I refused additional money after fixing the broken latch on his back door because I told his daughter that sitting with him was not an extra shift.
He remembered the soup I brought when he could not eat solid food.
He remembered me reading the same page twice after receiving a message from my mother about Noah’s treatment.
He remembered asking whether everything was all right.
I had told him yes.
Walter wrote that he knew I was lying then, too.
“She never asked me for money,” the lawyer read.
“She never mentioned an inheritance.
She did not ask what I owned or what anything was worth.
For nearly three years, she asked me only whether I was warm, whether I had taken my medicine, and whether I wanted another story.”
The real granddaughter’s fingers tightened around the edge of the table.
“She was already being paid.”
“Yes,” I said before I could stop myself.
“I was.”
Every face turned toward me.
I forced myself to continue.
“I accepted the job because my family needed money.
I called him Grandpa because that was what I had been hired to do.
I am not going to pretend the beginning was noble.”
The granddaughter folded her arms.
“Finally.”
“But I kept going because I cared about him.”
“You expect us to believe that?”
“No,” I said.
“I expected him to believe I was you.
Apparently, I was wrong about that too.”
Walter’s daughter covered her mouth.
Whether she was hiding a sob or a smile, I could not tell.
The lawyer returned to the letter.
“I paid her for the Sundays because she had agreed to do a job, and because I knew she would not accept charity.
But no hourly wage could have purchased what she gave me.
She allowed me to remain useful.
She listened when I spoke about my failures.
She argued with me when I became stubborn.
She laughed without pity.
Eventually, she stopped sounding like someone pretending to be family.”
The granddaughter stood.
“This proves nothing about the estate.”
