…Clara Anne Bennett. Your husband’s daughter. Born in 1979.”
I had married my husband, George, in 1981. He’d never mentioned a daughter.
The attorney, Mr. Price, explained. George had had a brief relationship before we met. When Clara was born, her mother didn’t want George involved, but he insisted on supporting his child. He created a trust for her and paid into it every month for forty years. He’d asked Mr. Price never to tell me, because he was afraid I’d leave him.
When George died, my son, David, became the trustee. He was supposed to pay Clara the income from the trust every year. Instead, he’d been quietly withdrawing money for himself. Over six years, more than $200,000 was gone. The notebook my granddaughter found was David’s record of every withdrawal, and every secret he was keeping from me.
“Make sure she takes the secret to her grave” meant me. David and his wife didn’t want me to find out about Clara or the money.
Mr. Price helped me remove David as trustee. I became trustee myself. Then I did something George never had the courage to do. I wrote to Clara.
She was forty-seven, a schoolteacher in Oregon. She’d thought her father had stopped caring after he died, because the trust payments had stopped too. When she read my letter, she called me crying.
David is repaying the trust. Clara visited me last summer. She has George’s eyes. My granddaughter, the one who sent me the notebook, sat between us at dinner and said, “So I have an aunt now?” Clara laughed. “You have an aunt now,” she said.
