The wood was smooth under my fingers. There was a small brass latch.
“That was Thomas’s trap.”
I thought of Raymond’s cold smile at the graveside. I thought of Thomas’s shining eyes.
I lifted the lid.
And what I saw inside made me gasp!
I pressed my hand to my mouth and sobbed.
Inside sat a folded deed to Thomas’s family home, trust documents in my name, and a thick stack of letters tied with twine. Fifty-five of them. One for every year he hadn’t written, every year until the one that finally brought me back to him.
I lifted the lid.
On top lay a handwritten note in his careful script.
I looked up at Walter, my throat tight, tears sliding down my cheeks.
“I don’t understand.”
“Read it, Nancy. He wanted you to hear it in his own words.”
Thomas had written that Aunt Margaret had been a customer at his father’s hardware store for 40 years, and a friend besides.
“I don’t understand.”
He’d tried to warn her about Raymond siphoning money from her accounts when he let it spill by mistake, but she wouldn’t hear a word against her nephew. When she passed, and Raymond walked away richer, Thomas had kept watching him.
So when he learned I’d moved back and taken the nursing job, with Raymond hovering close, he asked to be transferred to my ward.
“He knew,” I whispered. “He knew what Raymond was planning to do to me?”
He’d tried to warn her.
“He did. That’s why the wedding happened when it did, why I was there, and why he asked you to sign those papers.”
I pressed the note to my chest. I hadn’t said his name out loud in years, and now it was the only name that mattered.
“The trap wasn’t for me.”
“No, Nancy. It was for Raymond. Thomas made you his legal wife so no one could ever touch what he left you. It’s ironclad.”
I pressed the note to my chest.
***
Raymond came pounding on my door three days later, red-faced, waving threats about lawyers and undue influence.
Walter, who visited often, happened to be sitting at my kitchen table with tea.
“Every document is airtight,” my lawyer told Raymond calmly. “Contest it if you’d like. You’ll lose, and you’ll pay the fees.”
My cousin stared at me as if he were seeing a stranger.
“You foolish old woman!”
“Every document is airtight.”
“No, Raymond. I’m a woman who was loved. There’s a difference.”
He left without another word.
***
I moved into Thomas’s old house that spring. Every Sunday morning, I opened one letter and read it slowly with my coffee.
Love hadn’t passed me by. It had waited 56 years, and even in leaving, it had wrapped its arms around me one last time.
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