As Lina passed me, she leaned in just enough for her words to sting.
“She kept you around because you were useful,” she murmured. “I hope this clears things up.”
I didn’t respond. I carried the plant home carefully, unsure whether I’d been honored or dismissed.
That night, under the weak glow of a bedside lamp, I opened the envelope. The handwriting inside was unsteady but familiar.
My stepmother wrote about the quiet after my father died—the empty mornings, the long evenings. She admitted that Lina had been busy with her own life, drifting further away each year. And then she wrote about me. About how I never rushed her. How I made tea every morning. How my presence, quiet as it was, made the house feel less hollow.
The jade plant, she explained, had once belonged to her own mother. It was a symbol of resilience. Of survival through neglect and time.
“Care for it,” she wrote. “Some things grow stronger in silence.”
The bitterness I’d been holding onto loosened its grip. What she left me wasn’t money—but trust.
The next morning, my phone rang again. This time, Lina was crying.
“The lawyer found another letter,” she said through broken breaths. “She said she gave me everything because she thought I needed protection. But you… she trusted you with what mattered most to her. I didn’t see it. I didn’t understand.”
For a long moment, neither of us spoke.
I looked at the jade plant on my windowsill, its thick green leaves glowing in the sunlight.
“Maybe,” I said quietly, “we both misunderstood her.”
Lina exhaled, the sound heavy with regret rather than anger. We agreed to meet—not to argue over belongings, but to talk. To remember.
And as the jade plant sat between us later that afternoon, I understood something I hadn’t before:
sometimes love doesn’t announce itself with grand gestures.
Sometimes it’s shown through trust—quiet, steady, and meant only for those who know how to care for it.
