My Late Wife’s Trust Had One Condition I Didn’t Understand. The Woman Who Manages It Finally Told Me What It Meant

My name is Rafael Castillo. I’m 55, and I grow olives on a small ranch in the Texas Hill Country, outside Dripping Springs.

People don’t believe that olives grow in Texas. They do. My wife, Marisol, planted the first two hundred trees eighteen years ago, because she grew up in Spain and missed the smell of olive groves in the evening.

Now there are four thousand trees. We press our own oil and sell it at farmers markets from Austin to San Antonio.

Marisol died three and a half years ago. Breast cancer. She fought it for two years with more courage than I’ve ever had about anything.

Before she died, she sat down with our estate planning attorney and set up a trust for our daughter, Lucía, who was fifteen. Her life insurance policy funded it. College, graduate school, a first home someday.

The trust was managed by the private banking department of a bank in Austin. A trust officer named Isabel Navarro.

And Marisol put one condition in it that nobody understood.

Once a year, on the anniversary of her death, I had to have dinner with the trust officer. At a restaurant of Isabel’s choosing. And I had to tell her one thing that had made me happy that year.

If I didn’t, Isabel was instructed to “make him try harder.”

The estate attorney thought it was a joke. The bank thought it was eccentric. I thought it was Marisol, who always knew I’d hide on the ranch and stop living if she wasn’t there to drag me out.

The first year, I sat across from Isabel at a steakhouse in Austin and couldn’t think of a single thing.

She was 47, with dark hair pinned up, gold earrings and very patient eyes.

“Take your time,” she said. “I have all night.”

I sat there for forty minutes.

Finally, I said, “The olives came in early.”

She wrote it down in her notebook.

“That will do for this year, Mr. Castillo,” she said. “Next year, I’ll expect better.”