So I did not argue with his children. I went upstairs to Mr. Duval, who was awake, and sharp, and had heard every ugly word they said about me through the floor of his own house.
Because that was the thing his children forgot in their hurry to call me a fraud. Mr. Duval was not a confused old man. He was ninety one and sharp as a tack, and he was very much alive, sitting upstairs listening to his own blood call the woman who cared for him a gold digging thief.
I helped him down the stairs, because he asked me to, and he walked into that kitchen under his own power and looked at his children with eyes clearer than any of them wanted to see. And he set the record straight himself, in his own voice, which was the one thing they could not argue with.
He told them he was of sound mind, and that anyone who wanted to claim otherwise could say it to his face and to his doctor, who would laugh them out of the room. He told them he had changed his will himself, on purpose, that no one had manipulated a thing, and that he had left me his fathers watch because it was the only way he knew to thank the person who had actually shown up.
And then he said the thing that ended it. He told them that he had wondered, these three years, who his real family was, the blood that visited once a year when a holiday demanded it, or the woman who bathed him and cooked for him and listened to his stories so he would not be alone. And he said they had just answered the question for him, loud enough to hear upstairs.
They did not get me thrown out. They did not get my name ruined. You cannot convince a room that a man is a confused victim while that man stands in front of you, lucid and furious, defending the person you are trying to rob him of.
The children left that day with a great deal less than they came for, and I stayed, because Mr. Duval asked me to, for as long as he had left.
They came running for a watch and forgot the man who owned it could still speak for himself. He lived another two years, and I was with him to the end, the way I had been all along. When he passed, I kept that watch, his fathers old wind up watch, and I wind it every morning. It does not keep perfect time anymore, but it keeps something better than time. It keeps the memory of a lonely old man who, when it counted, stood up and called me family.