I once believed my family was unbreakable. My husband was a respected man, the director of a large company, admired and trusted by everyone around him. For more than twenty years we built a life together — or so I thought.

Then one day he stood in front of me, distant and strangely calm, and said:

“I’m leaving. There’s someone else. She’s younger. I want a new life.”

Those words cut straight through me.
But what came afterward hurt far more.

Our children — our children — immediately took his side.
They insisted he “deserved happiness,” that this was “his choice,” and that I would “find a way to cope.”

They spoke as if our family wasn’t collapsing… as if I hadn’t just lost everything.

And suddenly, I was alone.
Deeply, painfully alone.

Years went by.
The children drifted away — fewer calls, fewer visits, then nothing at all.
They built their own lives while mine shrank into silence.

Meanwhile, my ex-husband enjoyed his second youth beside a woman who could almost have been his daughter. She stepped into my place without hesitation, as if she had always belonged there.

Then one morning the phone rang:
he was gone.

I didn’t cry.
There was nothing left inside me that could still break.

But the real shock came after the funeral.
It turned out that every part of his estate — the house, the savings, the land — had been left entirely to his young wife.
Not a single inheritance for the children.
And of course, nothing for me.

And suddenly, as if on cue, my children remembered I existed.

They began visiting, bringing gifts, asking about my health, calling more often than they had in a decade.
A miraculous transformation, if one didn’t know the truth behind it.

But I saw through it immediately.

This was not love.
Not remorse.
It was fear — fear that I might leave my belongings to someone else.

Recently, my daughter started hinting gently… very gently… that maybe I should “think about the future,” about a will, about making sure “our family assets don’t end up with strangers.”

Her voice was sweet, but her eyes betrayed everything:
expectation, calculation, greed.

They truly believe that a few visits and a handful of empty smiles are enough to convince me to leave them everything when I’m gone.

They have no idea how wrong they are.

My will has been written for quite a long time.
And it looks nothing like the version they imagine.

Once, I wanted my children to inherit something meaningful — a piece of my life, a reminder of who I was.
But children who can forget their mother for years, and return only when money is involved, don’t deserve a single thing.

That is why everything I own — my small apartment, my savings, the few valuables I have — will go to someone else entirely.

To the person who actually stood by me when I needed help most.

My neighbor across the hall.
The woman who brought me meals when I was sick.
Who sat with me when loneliness felt unbearable.
Who treated me like a human being — not an obligation, not a burden.

She will inherit everything.

And my children will discover this only after my death.
Perhaps then — for the first time ever — they will understand what it truly means to lose something.

It will be their lesson.
Late, painful, but deserved.

And it is the last right I still have:
to decide how my story ends… on my own terms.