He smiled a little.
“You have every right to be. I lied to you. I let you think you were the lucky one who got assigned to me. The truth is, I’ve been the lucky one since I was nine.”
He looked away from the camera for a moment.
“I need to tell you why I asked you to marry me. Because I know what you’re thinking. You think it was guilt. You think I was paying a bill.”
He shook his head slowly.
“I was going to leave you the house anyway, Claire. I didn’t need to marry you for that. Arthur could have written a will in an afternoon.”
I paused the video. I sat there with my hand over my mouth.
Then I pressed play.
“About three weeks ago, you told me something while we were playing Scrabble. You said that in thirty-four years, nobody had ever written your name down as family. Not on a school form. Not on an emergency contact card. Not at a hospital. You said you always left that line blank.”
