I’m leaving it to you. Because you’re the one person I’ve ever met who will understand exactly what it’s for. That’s what you really signed for, Grace. Not to be my wife in any way you feared. To be my heir, and the keeper of the one thing I’ve done that ever mattered.”
Chapter 4: The Months We Had
Caleb had his surgery two weeks after the wedding. It went perfectly. And my son came home to recover — to a mansion, of all places, with a grumpy, dying old man who turned out to adore him.
Those were strange and beautiful months, the last of Arthur’s life. He had told his sister’s caregiver he needed a wife his children couldn’t control. What he actually got, in the end, was the family he’d never had. Caleb, once he was strong enough, would sit with Arthur for hours — the old man teaching the boy chess, and cards, and the history of every painting in the house. Arthur, who’d raised three strangers, spent the last season of his life becoming something like a grandfather to a little boy who’d never had one, and I watched a man who thought he’d die surrounded by vultures instead die surrounded by love.
