He handed me an envelope with my name across it.
I recognized her handwriting immediately.
"Dear James, Before you refuse the books, there's something I should have told you while I was alive."
"I knew your grandmother."
I stopped reading.
My grandmother, Margaret, was 73 and lived 20 minutes from my apartment.
She'd never mentioned Eleanor.
I continued.
"Margaret and I were practically sisters. We grew up together, shared everything, and promised nothing would separate us."
"Then we married, and I made a terrible mistake."
Eleanor explained that she'd recognized my surname when we met.
It was the name my Grandma Margaret had taken when she married.
At first, she'd assumed it was coincidence.
But after we'd become friends, she searched old newspaper announcements.
She found my father's name in a family notice and recognized it from something I'd told her.
She discovered I was her former best friend's grandson.
"By then," she wrote, "you had already become very dear to me. I was afraid telling you would change everything."
