My husband’s children spent a decade telling everyone I only married him for the house — after his funeral, his attorney handed me a locked box.
My name is Patricia, and I married my husband, Frank, eleven years ago, three years after his first wife passed away.
His two adult children, Brad and Stephanie, made their opinion of me clear from the very first Thanksgiving.
“She’s just here for the house,” Stephanie said once, not even bothering to lower her voice when I was standing in the next room.
Frank’s house — the one he’d built with his first wife decades earlier — sat on four acres and was worth more than I made in five years combined.
For eleven years, I heard some version of that sentence at every family gathering. I stopped correcting them after the third year. It never made a difference.
Frank passed away last month, quietly, in his sleep, after a long battle with his heart.
