By now Mr.Abernathy has told you that I was not the man I appeared to be. Let me tell you the whole truth, because you, of all the people in my life, have earned it.
My name really is Thomas. That part was true. But I was not a poor old man dying alone because no one cared.
I built a company. A large one. Over fifty years I became very wealthy — the kind of wealthy that puts your name on buildings, if you let it, which I never did.
I had a family once. A wife. A son. I lost my wife to illness twenty years ago, and my son — my beautiful boy — to an accident five years after that. Grief hollowed me out. I threw myself into work, into money, because money was the one thing that never left, and I told myself that was enough.
It wasn’t. I discovered, dying, that I had a fortune and no one to leave it to. No one who’d loved me for me. Everyone in my life by then wanted something — an investment, an inheritance, a favor. I couldn’t tell, anymore, who was real.
