I have no other way to describe it.

The number did not compute.

It was more money than I had ever seen, more than I had ever let myself imagine, and it was made out to me, a delivery driver, by a woman I had been hired to deceive, who had seen through the deception on day one and decided to love me through it anyway.

I sat in that office and I pressed the letter to my face and I wept without any shame at all, the deep helpless weeping of a man who has carried a weight so long he has forgotten it can be set down, and is suddenly, without warning, told to let it go.

“She finalized the bequest two weeks before she passed,” the director explained, once I could hear her again.