I'm leaving you everything, on paper, because you're the only person who sat with me at the end without needing anything from me in return. But I need you to understand something before you decide what to do with any of it. Money was never really the thing I wanted to leave behind. I wanted, somehow, for Desmond to finally hear that I never stopped loving him, even in the silence. I don't know how to arrange that from where I'll be. I'm hoping, selfishly, that you might find a way I couldn't.
— Bennett
I'm hoping, selfishly, that you might find a way I couldn't.
I sat with that letter for a long time after Gerald finally left, the green backpack still open on the floor beside me, twenty years of unsent grief bundled together with a rubber band.
Legally, Gerald explained before he left, the will Bennett had drafted during our week of marriage named me as sole beneficiary, clean and uncontestable. Desmond, as an adult adoptee with no biological claim and two decades of estrangement, had no automatic legal standing to challenge any of it even if he'd wanted to.
