Or whether she had written one final story to make herself easier to forgive.
I almost put the letter down.
Part of me wanted to.
If the rest of it was another lie, I wasn’t sure I could take much more.
But I forced myself to keep reading.
I needed a heart transplant.
My mother wrote that she knew she didn’t have much time left.
Her health had worsened again, and recently she had learned something that terrified her more than her own condition.
I needed a heart transplant.
She didn’t explain exactly how she had found out. She only wrote that once she knew, she could not stop thinking about me.
Then came the line.
She said she had spoken to her doctors and made her wishes clear.
If her heart was medically suitable for me, and if everything could be done properly through the transplant system, she wanted me to have it.
Then came the line that finally broke me.
“I could not give you the life I should have given you. If I can give you more of yours, I want to.”
There was more.
I covered my mouth and started crying.
There was more.
She had left me her house. A small key slipped from the envelope and landed in my lap.
My mother ended the letter by apologizing again.
She did not ask me to forget what she had done. She did not say I owed her forgiveness.
I covered my mouth.
She only wrote that if some part of me could ever forgive her, she would be grateful.
I pressed a hand to my chest.
I still didn’t know whether I believed everything she had written.
But the heart beating beneath my palm made it impossible to simply dismiss her.
The next morning, I told Grandma everything.
Grandma was not.
My husband already knew, and our daughter understood only that the grandmother she had never met had left us a house. At first, she was excited.
Grandma was not.
She listened without interrupting, her mouth tightening more with every sentence.
When I finished, she gave a small, humorless laugh.
I stared at her.
“Well. At least she finally did something useful.”
I stared at her.
“Grandma.”
“What?” she snapped. “That woman ruined your father’s life. She disappeared and left the rest of us to clean up after her.”
I almost mentioned the letter. Before I could answer, she continued.
“What?”
“There should be enough room for me too. No sense paying for two places when we can all live together.”
She said it so naturally that for a moment I nearly agreed out of habit.
Grandma had raised me. She had always been part of every major decision in my life.
Still, the assumption bothered me.
