My name is Clara Brennan, and at sixty-three years old, I’ve learned that being underestimated is sometimes the greatest advantage you can have. For two years after my husband Richard died, I’d been drifting through life like a ghost in my own house, going through the motions while everyone around me offered sympathy and unsolicited advice about how a widow should live. What they didn’t know was that while Richard had been the one who fixed leaky faucets and programmed remote controls, I was the one who’d quietly turned our modest salaries into an eight-million-dollar portfolio.
Turns out all those Sunday dinners listening to my father discuss the stock market had paid off better than anyone expected. The thing about being a wealthy widow is that people suddenly start caring about your well-being in ways they never did before. Take my son-in-law David, for instance.
Three years ago when my daughter Emma first brought him home, he couldn’t have cared less about my car maintenance schedule. Now, suddenly, he was overflowing with wisdom about oil changes and tire rotations, his concern so touching it almost felt genuine. David Mitchell was thirty-seven, worked in financial planning, drove a spotless BMW, and had the kind of smile that made waitresses slip extra bread onto his plate.
Emma had met him at a charity gala—one of those events where wealthy people pay five hundred dollars to eat rubber chicken and feel virtuous—and she’d been smitten from the start. This should have been my first warning sign. My only child had always possessed a talent for choosing men the way some people pick lottery numbers: with hope, enthusiasm, and absolutely no logic whatsoever.
There had been Marcus the musician who turned out to be married, Brett the businessman who turned out to be broke, and Kevin the entrepreneur who turned out to be selling essential oils to his grandmother’s bridge club. So when Emma walked through my door with David three years ago, I’d been prepared for disaster. But David seemed different.
He asked thoughtful questions, remembered details from previous conversations, and actually helped clear the table without being asked. He brought flowers on Mother’s Day—real arrangements from actual florists, not gas station bouquets. He listened when I talked about Richard without suggesting I should start dating again or that I shouldn’t waste my golden years alone.
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