She owed me nothing.

I had been a paid deception in her life, and even after she saw through it, even after she chose to love the man behind the lie, she owed that man nothing more than the pleasure of his company on quiet afternoons.

She could have simply enjoyed the visits and let the story end when she did.

Instead she had gone to the trouble, in the last months of a long and tiring life, of summoning her attorney, of drawing up a trust, of thinking carefully about a sick woman named Evelyn whom she had never met and never would, and of arranging, with legal precision, to lift a burden off the shoulders of strangers after she herself was gone.

People do not generally spend their dying energy on the troubles of people they owe nothing.