Bailey licked my wrist like he approved of the plan.
The weeks after that were a blur of paperwork, phone calls, and whispered gossip among relatives who suddenly had a lot of opinions about what Grandma “would have wanted.”Zack made good on his threat and tried to contest the will.
From what my mom heard, he burned through almost his $100,000 on lawyers, travel, and rage-fueled spending sprees before a judge finally told him the will was valid and that grief was not the same thing as being wronged.
Last I checked his social media, which I probably shouldn’t have done, he was complaining about fake family and posting cryptic memes about snakes.Meanwhile, I kept going to work, taking Bailey on slow walks around my neighborhood, and meeting with professionals whose offices smelled like coffee and printer ink.
We made a plan to pay off my student loans, set aside enough money so I could one day buy a small house with a yard, and invest the rest the way Grandma had been doing, quietly and patiently.
I also carved out a portion for a scholarship fund in her name and another for local animal rescues, because it felt wrong to have that much and not open the circle wider.
On weekends, I drive out to her old neighborhood, park in front of the little blue house that now belongs to some young couple with flower boxes, and walk Bailey along our old route.
Sometimes the new owners are on the porch and we trade polite waves, but they don’t know that the dog sniffing their mailbox is basically the retired keeper of a family secret.Bailey grows slower every month.
His joints ache, his eyes get cloudy around the edges, and sometimes he forgets where he was going halfway down the hall.
But at night, when he curls against my bed and lets out a long sigh, I feel this strange steadiness, like Grandma is still here, supervising from somewhere I cannot see.Sometimes I hold his tag in my hand and run my thumb over the engraving, over the code that changed everything, and I think about how she hid the biggest thing she owned on the smallest, most ordinary object in her house.
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