I was happy through those decades — not because our life was free of trouble, no life is, but because the man beside me was my husband and my best friend and the hand I reached for through every storm.

I say all of this so that you understand what was at stake in that lawyer’s office, and why the word nothing landed on me the way it did.

It was not only money.

Money I could have survived losing.

What I could not survive, in that first hour, was the thought that the man I had given my entire life to had chosen, as his final act, to tell the world that I had meant nothing to him.

That is what the empty will seemed to say.