When my mother-in-law died, I didn’t cry—just felt relief. She’d spent ten years disapproving of me. But at her memorial, my husband handed me a velvet box. “She wanted you to have this,” he said.Inside was a silver necklace with a sapphire pendant. On the back were my initials—L.T.—and a note in her handwriting: “I hated you not for who you were, but for what you reminded me of—who I used to be before I gave it all up. You were everything I lost the courage to become.”
She confessed she once loved a man named Lucas—the “L” on the pendant. The “T,” she wrote, was for the daughter she never had. “In a strange way… I see her in you.” I cried for the first time in years. Later, her will included a brass key “for my daughter-in-law.” I knew it belonged to the locked attic she’d once forbidden me to enter.
