When my father died, I thought the worst part would be the grief. I was wrong.
The real shock came afterward, when the will was read.
After twenty-five years of marriage, my stepmother, Sandra, was left with nothing. No savings. No property. Not even the house she had lived in for half her life. My father had quietly put everything in my sister’s name years earlier. I watched Sandra sit there, hands folded in her lap, her face perfectly still as the lawyer spoke. She didn’t cry. She didn’t argue. She just nodded once, as if she had expected it all along.
