I stared at him. “He never once mentioned any of that.”
“He wasn’t hiding the money from you exactly,” Gerald said. “He was hiding something considerably harder to say out loud.”
He was hiding something considerably harder to say out loud.
I want to explain what I believed, sitting in that chair with a stranger’s fortune balanced on my knees. I believed I was about to hear that Bennett had lived some secret double life, an affair, a hidden past he’d been ashamed of. Something that would make sense of a will handed to a hospital volunteer he’d known for three weeks.
That belief lasted almost exactly as long as it took Gerald to open the first folder.
“Bennett had a stepson,” Gerald said. “A young man named Desmond Cole. Bennett married Desmond’s mother, Eleanor, when Desmond was eight years old. Raised him for the next eleven years like his own blood, by every account I’ve heard from people who knew that family well.
