The message came late one Wednesday night. “Does anyone have a little to spare? I need $60 for something important,” my grandmother wrote in our family chat. No one replied. Not my mom, my aunts, or my cousins. I stared at the screen, waiting. Nothing. Two days later, she died in her sleep. At her apartment, I found a small, neatly wrapped box on the kitchen table. A note beside it read: “Thank you for remembering me.”

Inside were two leather sketchbooks and graphite pencils—the same set I’d once admired in a store. Another note, written in her delicate handwriting, said: “You always believed in my stories. I wanted you to have the tools to tell your own.” That $60 she’d asked for—it wasn’t for bills or groceries. It was for this gift. Her last act on Earth was a gesture of love.

At her funeral, while others brought flowers, I brought that box. “I didn’t come here to talk about loss,” I said. “I came to talk about love—the quiet kind.” Later, I opened her sketchbooks and began writing. Each page felt like a conversation with her. The story that began as hers became mine—a story about love that doesn’t die, it just changes form.

A year later, I finished the book and placed the first copy on her grave. “You always believed in my stories,” her note had said. And I whispered, “I did, Grandma. Because of you.”