All I wanted was to lend a hand to my elderly neighbor after she took a fall in her yard. I never expected that simple act of kindness to spark a family feud, uncover a hidden fortune, and change my son’s and my life in ways I could never have imagined. My name is Aaron.
I am 29, and I live in a quiet corner of Indiana. For the past four years, I have been raising my son, Jack, on my own. He is curious, stubborn, kind-hearted, and my entire world.
He’s the reason why I can’t falter, even when everything seems impossible. I work mostly as a handyman around town. Gutters, fences, patchy driveways, you name it.
It’s not glamorous, but it’s honest work, and it keeps us afloat. Jack’s mom, Hannah, left when he was still in diapers. There was no dramatic fight, no teary goodbye at the door.
Just a single text: “This life isn’t for me.
You’ll do better without me.”
That text still lives in the back of my mind, no matter how many times I change phones. It was like she vanished into thin air, like Jack and I were a detour she got tired of driving through. For the longest time, I could not even look at the bassinet without choking up.
Every midnight fever I soothed, every tiny shoe I tied, and every daycare pickup reminded me that she had chosen freedom over family. I resented her, but I also feared becoming bitter, because Jack did not deserve that. So I kept pushing forward.
Some days, that meant three jobs back-to-back. Other days, it meant quietly skipping dinner so Jack could have seconds. But I survived.
We survived. That’s how I met Mrs. Whitmore.
She lived two houses down, and I had passed her place a hundred times. It was a little white cottage with wild roses crawling over the trellis, and her garden always looked like something out of a painting. She was probably in her late 70s, maybe early 80s, with silver hair pinned neatly in a bun and hands that were always covered in soil or flour.
One blazing afternoon in July, I was up on a ladder fixing a leaky gutter for a client next door when I spotted her in her yard, wrestling with an old push mower. It was jerking along like it hadn’t been serviced in years, and she looked unsteady. Before I could shout, the mower bucked forward, and she fell hard onto the grass.
“Mrs. Whitmore!” I dropped the wrench and jumped off the ladder, sprinting across the lawn. She was pale, her hands trembling as she tried to sit up.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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