He didn’t meet my eyes at first, just held out the envelope like it might break between us. Seeing my name in my mother’s unsteady handwriting felt like the floor returning beneath my feet. Inside, her words were raw and unvarnished: the fear, the exhaustion, the way illness had narrowed her choices until they no longer looked like choices at all. Clarissa’s insistence, the lawyers, the appointments—she described it as being slowly pushed out of her own life.

The key she tucked into the fold led not to riches, but to a quiet corner of truth: her ring, our photographs, a journal crowded with the love she never quite managed to say out loud. Page after page, she wrote to the child she thought she’d failed. In those sentences, I learned that a will can be forged under pressure, but love, recorded in secret ink, remains stubbornly, defiantly honest.