I stood.
I put the photograph back into the box.
Then I closed the lid.
Rebecca watched me.
“Where are you going?”
I looked at her.
“Home.”
She frowned.
“You mean Dad’s house?”
I held the brass key tightly in my hand.
“No.”
I looked toward the door.
“Richard’s house.”
And for the first time since his death, I felt something other than grief.
I felt that he was still trying to tell me something.
Something important.
Something that had started long before our first meeting.
Something that might explain why a wealthy seventy-three-year-old man had fallen in love with a broke thirty-two-year-old woman.
And as I drove back to the house that afternoon, one thought kept repeating in my mind.
Richard hadn’t left me his fortune because I was his wife.
He had left it because, somehow, years before we ever met, he had already decided that I was the person who deserved to have it.
I just didn’t know why.
Not yet.
