Chapter 4 - What I Did With ItI never treated what Colleen left me like it fell out of the sky. I paid off our mortgage. I set up a college fund for my son that nobody could touch. And with the rest, I started a small foundation in her name, one that pays for home care for elderly folks in our county who don't have anybody left to sit with them.
My husband's brothers and sister stopped speaking to us not long after. They're still bitter about money they never had a claim to in the first place. I don't carry guilt over that. Strange as it sounds, I don't carry much anger either.
Some nights I sit out on the porch with a cup of tea and listen to the wind moving through the trees, and I think about what she told me all those years ago, crying beside her bed.
That's exactly why, honey. That's why God's gonna look at you different.
Maybe she was right about that. But the land was never really the gift. The lesson underneath it was.
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Real love doesn't show up in what people say when there's an audience. It shows up in the meals nobody sees you make, the medicine you keep track of at midnight, the hand you keep holding long after everybody else has already left the room.
Colleen didn't leave me that pillow because she thought I'd earned a reward. She left it to me because for twelve years, I loved her when I never once expected to get anything back.
