Tuesday, 15th November
Since the children started calling daily. Not out of care, I suspect, but inheritance.
Margaret Hayworth stood by the window, watching the damp winter drizzle settle over her garden. The house was silent but for the steady tick of the grandfather clock. Retirement had stretched long, and with it came too many hours to think about her grown children—two daughters and a son. Today was her birthday. Would they visit? Or at least remember to ring? If she were honest, she’d long abandoned hope.
“Thirty years ago, Henry left me with three young children,” she reflected bitterly. “He couldn’t bear the responsibility—the crying, the mess, never having enough. I was barely thirty myself. The girls had just started primary school, the boy still in nappies. They needed feeding, clothing, schooling…”
She hadn’t broken. She’d scrubbed floors, worked tills, minded other people’s children—anything to keep them fed. There’d been no time for herself. Just the stubborn dream that her three would want for nothing.
Now, looking back, she wondered if she’d been wrong to prioritise money over warmth. They’d needed more than full bellies and new uniforms. They’d needed her—storybooks at bedtime, a listening ear.
No one had helped her then. Henry had vanished as if they’d never existed. “His choice,” she thought, without anger now. “We all walk our own path.”
The children had grown, built their own lives. Married, moved away. She’d stayed. Her pension was modest, but Margaret had always saved—for their weddings, their mortgages, her future grandchildren.
Now, what remained? Savings, this terraced house in Kensington, and silence. No one to share even a cuppa with.
Last week, a sharp pain in her chest sent her to hospital. Tests followed, then words that turned her world grey: serious condition, uncertain prognosis.
The staff contacted her family. Miraculously, all three arrived within hours.
The woman in the next bed had sighed. “You’re lucky. Such devoted children!”
Margaret had only smiled thinly. She knew them too well to mistake duty for devotion.
After discharge, the calls began.
“Mum, how are you feeling?”
“Mother, do you need anything?”
“Mum, have you considered updating your will? To avoid complications later.”
Polite. Scripted. Empty. No true concern beneath it, the kind that can’t be faked. She heard what they didn’t say: the terraced house, the savings she’d scraped together.
It tore at her. Had it all come to this?
Lately, she’d thought more than ever. Staring at neighbours’ glowing windows, she faced the truth—her old age wasn’t the one she’d imagined. No grandchildren by the fireplace, no Sunday roasts with laughter. Just silence, and calls timed like clockwork, laced with greed.
An unthinkable idea had taken root: leave it all to charity. The house? Perhaps to Miriam next door—the one who’d brought her soup after surgery, who dusted her shelves and asked, “How are you today, love?” without once glancing at her silverware.
No final decision yet. But Margaret had begun to understand: love can’t be bought with houses or trust funds. It either exists, or it doesn’t.
Life comes once. So does old age.
And if she must face hers alone, let her final acts be honest—not wasted on those who forgot her when she needed them most.
