I Was Paid to Pretend to Be His Granddaughter — Then His Final Wish Shocked His Family
“I’ll read it exactly as he dictated it, because he was very specific.
‘To the young woman my daughter paid to pretend to be my granddaughter — yes, Patrice, I knew.
I knew by her second Sunday.
I am blind, not deaf.’”
Patrice’s arms came uncrossed.
And what he read next left everyone in that room stunned.
PART 2
Mr. Abernathy turned the page.
He was a small, tidy man in his sixties who had, he’d tell me later, done Mr. Booker’s legal work for thirty years and had never once been asked to read anything aloud to a room.
“‘My granddaughter Kiara has a laugh like her grandmother.
This girl laughs like somebody who learned it from a tired mother.
I loved them both.
I would like the record to show I was not fooled for one minute past the first Sunday, and that I let it go on for eleven months because I wanted to see who my daughter had hired, and because — by the third week — I didn’t want her to stop coming.’”
The room was very quiet.
