My husband passed away almost three years ago. Recently, a woman showed up at my door saying the kid she had with her was my late husband’s child. I don’t know if it’s true and I don’t care.
I told her that he was gone. She almost immediately started demanding “her half” of his estate. I laughed and told her that she was three years too late and that there wasn’t even a will, let alone an “estate” to split.
She stood there, arms crossed, the little boy clutching her coat. He couldn’t have been older than six. I tried to focus on his face, to see if I recognized something of my husband in him.
Maybe the eyes. Maybe the hair. But at that moment, I couldn’t see past my own anger.
Her tone changed quickly. “Look,” she said, “I don’t want to fight. I just think my son deserves what’s rightfully his.
He was Michael’s child too.”
I bit the inside of my cheek. Michael. My Michael.
The man I married. The man I held as he took his last breath. And now she was standing here, throwing his name around like it gave her some right to barge into my life.
He’s dead,” I said, flatly. “And he left nothing but a pickup truck with a cracked windshield and a mortgage I barely managed to finish paying last year. You want half the truck?
Be my guest. It won’t get you far.”
She scoffed and turned around with the boy. “You’ll hear from my lawyer,” she muttered.
But she never came back. No lawyer ever called. Weeks passed.
Then months. And then… guilt. I didn’t expect it.
But I started thinking about that boy. The way he held her hand. The way he didn’t say a word, just looked at me with wide, curious eyes.
Like he had questions, but no one ever answered them for him. I told myself I owed him nothing. But that didn’t stop me from looking him up.
I found her Facebook. She didn’t even try to hide it. Pictures of her and the boy at the park, in front of a cake on his sixth birthday.
His name was Daniel. I stared at that name for a long time. Daniel. My husband had always liked that name.
Said if we ever had a son, that’s what he’d want to call him. I never told him I couldn’t have kids. I found out after we got married.
He was kind about it, said it didn’t matter. But I always wondered if it did. One Sunday, I drove to the park I’d seen in their pictures.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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