The lawyer began reading.<\/p>\n
Margaret had left me a letter inside the will.<\/p>\n
She wrote that she had spent years refusing marriage because she believed loving me meant protecting me from everything connected to her illness.<\/p>\n
Then, shortly before her surgery, she learned something that changed her mind.<\/p>\n
Her grandfather had created a trust for her years earlier. Under its terms, if Margaret died unmarried, most of what remained would return to extended family members she barely knew.<\/p>\n
But if she died legally married, her surviving spouse became the primary beneficiary.<\/p>\n
I stopped breathing.<\/p>\n
The lawyer explained that the trust contained enough money to pay off my student loans, cover the apartment we had shared, and leave me financially secure for years.<\/p>\n
Then he read Margaret\u2019s final paragraph.<\/p>\n
She said she knew I would never marry her for money.<\/p>\n
That was exactly why she trusted me with it.<\/p>\n
She wanted the person who had spent years taking care of her to finally be taken care of too.<\/p>\n
I cried harder reading that letter than I had at the funeral.<\/p>\n
Not because of the money.<\/p>\n
Because even while facing the end of her own life, Margaret had still been thinking about mine.<\/p>\n
For years, she refused to marry me because she thought it would protect me.<\/p>\n
In her final week, she discovered that becoming my wife was the last way she could.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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