I did not fall in romantic love with Arthur, and he never wanted me to — that was never the shape of it, and he’d been clear from the closed-door conversation onward. What grew between us was something else, rarer maybe: a deep, real, chosen-family love. I cared for him at the end the way I’d cared for my patients my whole life, except this time it was for a man who’d looked at me when I had nothing and decided I was worth everything. I held his hand through the hard nights. Caleb drew him pictures. And when Arthur died, peacefully, in a house that had gone quiet and warm, my son and I were the ones at his bedside — not the relatives who’d been counting his money, who weren’t even in the state.
He’d wanted a good death, free of the vultures. I made sure he got one.
