At 35, I married my wealthy 72-year-old boss so my daughter and I wouldn’t end up homeless. After he died, his lawyer looked at me and said, “He prepared this trap specifically for you… and he knew you would fall into it.”

The day Richard’s lawyer came to my door, I thought he had come to tell me how much money my husband had left me.

I was wrong.

“Richard left you nothing,” the lawyer said.

For a moment, I couldn’t breathe.

I stared at the man standing in my doorway, his leather briefcase resting beside his leg.

“Nothing?”

He nodded.

My hands began to tremble.

Five years earlier, I had married a seventy-two-year-old millionaire while I was a thirty-five-year-old widow drowning in debt and trying desperately to keep a roof over my daughter’s head.

For five years, I had wondered why a man like Richard had chosen a woman like me.

He never asked me to repay him.

He never treated me like a charity case.

He never demanded that I become someone I wasn’t.

He loved my daughter, Emily, as if she were his own.

And now he was dead.

I had expected grief.

I hadn’t expected this.

“You’re telling me Richard left me nothing?”

“That’s what his will says.”

I lowered myself into the nearest chair.

My mind raced through the years we had spent together.

The house.

The garden.

The mornings when I brought him coffee.

The nights when I sat beside him while his breathing became difficult.