My Husband Left Me With His Dying Mother For A “business Trip,” But I Found Photos Of Him In Miami With Another Woman. He Thinks He’s Inheriting Everything, But My Mother-in-law Left It All To Me. How Do I Break The News?

Return to the Hometown

After the cremation, I took the urn with the ashes and Elizabeth’s portrait and headed to her hometown, according to her last wishes. She wanted to be laid to rest there.

Michael had sent me a message telling me to leave the ashes in a city columbarium to make visiting more convenient. I flatly refused. I knew she wanted to go home, to the place where she was born and raised, the place where she had buried the secret of her entire life.

The bus rattled along, carrying me away from the noisy, polluted city toward the quiet but melancholic Illinois countryside. My mother-in-law’s old one-story house stood at the end of a reddish dirt road. The weeds had grown so high they almost concealed the entrance.

The rusted iron gate creaked pitifully as I pushed it open. A smell of dampness and mustiness greeted me. I placed the urn with her ashes on the small, dust-covered mantle. I lit a candle.

The smoke swirled in the silent space, creating an atmosphere of sadness and solitude. That night, I spread a mat on the floor right below my mother-in-law’s altar. Listening to the crickets chirping in the yard and the wind whistling through the cracks of a broken window, I could not sleep.

Elizabeth’s gaze in the photograph seemed to watch me, both stern and pleading. Her last words on that rainy night echoed in my ears: Under the ceramic crock where we kept the pickles in the corner of the kitchen.

I lay there with my eyes wide open, staring at the water stains on the ceiling, waiting for dawn to unveil the last secret my poor mother-in-law had left me.

I felt completely alone, but strangely I was not afraid. In that desolate place next to the ashes of a dead woman, I felt safer than in my modern city apartment where lies and betrayal hid beneath the guise of a happy family.

The Secret in the Soil

Just as dawn broke with dew still blanketing the yard, I got up. I took a small shovel I found in the shed and headed to the old kitchen, a small building separate from the main house. It had been abandoned for years.

Cobwebs covered the entrance, and a strong smell of dampness and cold ash washed over me. In a corner, just as my mother-in-law had said, was a large, heavy ceramic crock covered in the dust of time. It was the crock she used for brining pickles.

With some effort, I pushed the crock aside, revealing a packed dirt floor, damp and uneven. My heart pounded. I started to dig.

The surface was hard, but as I went deeper, the soil became softer. About two feet down, the shovel hit something hard, making a faint metallic sound. I set the shovel aside and used my hands to clear away the dirt.

It was a rusty metal tin, the kind of Danish butter cookie tin that people used to gift each other for Christmas decades ago. The tin was carefully wrapped in several layers of thick plastic to protect it from moisture.

Trembling, I carried it out to the yard, into the sunlight, to open it. The lid was sealed with rust, and I had to use the tip of the shovel to pry it open. Inside there was no gold or jewelry as I had imagined, only a savings passbook from a small community bank and a sealed, yellowed envelope.

I picked up the savings passbook and opened it to the first page. The number written there stunned me; I almost dropped it. $150,000.

I rubbed my eyes and looked again, counting the zeros carefully. Yes, $150,000. The last deposit had been recorded five years ago. I could not believe my eyes.

My mother-in-law, a woman who had spent her life working the land, who dressed so frugally she could not bring herself to throw away a shirt with frayed shoulders… where had she gotten this enormous amount of money?

Memories flooded back. About five years ago, an interstate highway project had passed through the town, and a large portion of my mother-in-law’s land had been acquired through eminent domain. At the time, Michael had asked her about the compensation, but she had vaguely said it was just a few thousand, which she had put in the bank for her old age and future medical needs.

Michael had believed her, thinking the land in that small town was worthless. He never imagined that patch of dirt held so much value. Why did she hide it from Michael? Why did she live in poverty, saving every penny even when she was gravely ill, without daring to use that money for better treatment?