“I am.”
“For what?”
“For why everybody will think this is something ugly.”
He reached across the table.
His fingers were warm.
“But I don’t care what everybody thinks.”
Then he said quietly:
“I would rather have three honest years with you than fifteen comfortable years without you.”
He was wrong about the number.
We got two years, eleven months, and seventeen days.
I said yes.
Richard’s children hated me immediately.
They were not subtle.
Rebecca was fifty-three, a successful interior designer who had never needed to wonder whether a credit card transaction would clear.
Andrew was fifty-one and held an executive position in Vale Meridian, the investment company Richard had spent most of his life building.
Michael had tried several careers and appeared to resent all of them.
They loved their father.
I believe that.
But they loved him possessively.
They saw me as an invasion.
I understood more than they realized.
