The room smelled like lavender and loss. I sat on the floor of my mother’s bedroom, holding her favorite old sweater, the scent of her still clinging to the fabric. That’s what finally broke me. Not the funeral, not the will—just a sweater. Neil, my partner, found me there. “You don’t have to do this alone,” he said gently.
We sifted through her things together—sweatpants she’d patched a dozen times, reminders of the hard years before a mysterious inheritance changed everything. She never told me where the money came from. Just, “From someone who owed us both.”Then the doorbell rang. The mail carrier handed me a yellowed envelope addressed to my mother. Inside, a message in angry, jagged handwriting: