It was from Richard.
My dear Nora,
If you’re reading this, I’m gone.
I’m sorry I kept the truth from you.
Richard explained everything.
Decades earlier, he had helped fund and renovate the very shelter where I had spent part of my childhood.
He had visited the shelter.
And one day, he had held a frightened little girl in his arms.
Me.
Years later, when I told him which shelter I had grown up in, he recognized me.
That’s why I’d seemed familiar when we first met.
But there was more.
He had overheard my conversation with my landlord.
He knew I was about to lose my home.
And he knew my pride would never allow me to simply accept charity.
So he found another way to protect me.
He offered me a family.
The letter continued:
You needed protection, but I knew you would never accept charity.
So I offered you the only security I could think of—a family.
Then came the part that made me cry.
Richard had never intended to take the estate for himself.
His home was being given to charity.
It would become a home for children from the same shelter where I had once lived.
And Richard had secretly created a separate fund years earlier for his future wife and children.
That fund had never been touched.
Until me.
Everything in it now belonged to Emily and me.
It was enough to ensure that neither of us would ever again face homelessness.
Then I read the final words.
You may believe I saved you, Nora.
The truth is that you and Emily saved an old man from dying without a family.
I pressed the photograph against my chest
and began to cry.
Richard had spent his life helping children who had no one.
And somehow, after all those years, he had found the little girl he once held in his arms.
The little stray kitten.
And instead of abandoning her again…
He gave her a home.
