Grady,
If you're reading this, it means Halloran finally let you get to the letter, which tells me he followed my instructions properly, the stubborn man.
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I know why you said yes to marrying me. I want you to understand, clearly, that I knew it from the very beginning, long before you ever asked. I wasn't confused about what a homeless twenty-nine-year-old man wanted from a seventy-six-year-old widow with a comfortable house and no children of her own.
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I married you anyway, Grady, because I wanted something too. I wanted four more years that didn't feel like waiting quietly to die alone in a house too big for one person. I got exactly that, and considerably more than I actually expected when I first asked you that question across my kitchen table.
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I had to stop reading for a moment, Mr. Halloran quietly sliding a box of tissues across the desk without comment.
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Somewhere in that first year, I started noticing you weren't counting anymore. I don't think you noticed it happening yourself, honestly. You stopped asking careful questions about my finances. You stopped angling conversations toward what might eventually be yours. You just started showing up, every single day, exactly the way you'd shown up outside that laundromat before you had any reason to expect anything from me at all.
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I set up this account eleven months ago, once I understood clearly that my own time was shorter than either of us wanted to admit out loud. I structured it this way, hidden in my mother's old sewing machine, specifically because I knew my nieces would never once look twice at that old thing. They've called it "Aunt Eleanor's junk" since they were teenagers. I always found that funny, honestly, given how much of my actual life happened at that machine.
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