He looked at me for a long time before answering. Then he said he had known my mother before I was born, and that he hadn’t moved into the house because he needed somewhere to live. He had been paying rent every month because my mother had made him a promise, and the promise had nothing to do with money. He said she told him that if he ever stopped paying, I would eventually come into the house and start changing things.
I asked him what he meant, and he finally told me that the reason he’d kept every room exactly as she left it was because my mother had asked him to protect something. He said she had given him a set of instructions in 2007, shortly before she died, and told him never to open the locked cabinet in her bedroom. He had followed that instruction for nineteen years, even though he admitted he’d been tempted more than once.
I went upstairs and opened the cabinet with the key I’d found in my mother’s old desk. Inside were dozens of envelopes, all addressed to me, but none had ever been mailed. Each one had a different date written on it, stretching from the year I left home until the year my mother died. The man stood in the doorway and told me he had never read them, because my mother had made him promise that the letters would remain untouched until I was the one who found them.
I picked up the first envelope and recognized my mother’s handwriting immediately. The date was three weeks before she died, and underneath my name she’d written one sentence: “If you’re reading this, then he kept his promise — and now you deserve to know why I asked him to stay.”
