Because there, sealed flat behind the backing board in the dark, was an envelope thick with something, and a letter in the fine hand of my aunt, and my heart began to pound.
I opened the envelope first. Money, yes, and bonds, but more than that, jewelry, real pieces, and folded among them, a smaller painting, a bright little original that the dull landscape had been hiding and protecting for decades, worth, I would learn, a great deal.
Then I read the letter, and I understood why she left it to me.
You were the only one who came, she wrote, the only one who sat with a lonely old woman and saw her, when my own children could not be bothered to call, so I hid what mattered behind a painting so dull no one would ever think to look, and I left it to you, because kindness is the only thing in this world worth rewarding.
She had children of her own. Grown, prosperous, and absent. They visited when they wanted something and forgot her the rest of the year. I was only her niece, but I came on Sundays, and I brought her tea, and I listened to her stories, because she was lonely and I could not bear it.
She saw that. She remembered it. And she rewarded it in the quietest, cleverest way she could, hiding a small fortune behind the ugliest painting in her house and leaving it to the one person who never wanted anything from her but her company.
I sank into the chair by the cold hearth and I wept for my aunt, who was lonely to the end, and who had, in her lonely wisdom, found a way to make certain that being kind to her was not for nothing.
Her children, when they learned what had been behind that painting, were furious. But my aunt had left it to me plainly, in the light, and there was nothing they could do, and I think that was exactly what she wanted. A last quiet word, from a woman they ignored, about who had actually loved her.
I did not keep the money for myself, not most of it. She would not have wanted me to become the thing her own children were. So I give some of it away every year, quietly, to old folks in homes who never get a visitor, in her name, so that other lonely souls are seen the way I tried to see her.
Thirty-four years I walked past that dull old landscape and never knew it hid the whole heart of my aunt, and her fortune, and her gratitude. I keep it on the wall still. It is the most beautiful thing I own, ugly as it is, because of what it means.
Be kind to the lonely. You never know what they are keeping behind the painting. But that was never why I came. And that, I think, is exactly why she chose me.