Eighteen months after Catherine died, my lawyer called and asked me to come to her office for something urgent. Elena Martinez didn’t do urgent unless it truly mattered, so I went without asking questions. The drive from Bozeman to her downtown office took twenty minutes through October rain, the kind of persistent drizzle that made everything look gray and blurred.
I kept the radio off. Silence had become my companion since Catherine’s funeral—easier than filling the emptiness with noise that only emphasized how quiet the house had become. Elena’s office sat on the third floor of a renovated brick building that still smelled faintly of old paper and wood polish.
Her secretary waved me straight through, which was unusual. Elena stood when I entered, her expression carefully neutral in that way lawyers perfect when they’re about to deliver news that will hurt. “Tom, thank you for coming,” she said, gesturing to the chair across from her desk.
“Can I get you coffee?”
“I’m fine,” I said, though I wasn’t. I hadn’t been fine since the morning Catherine stopped breathing in the hospice bed we’d set up in our living room, sunlight streaming through the windows while I held her hand and whispered that it was okay to let go. Elena sat down and pulled a manila envelope from her desk drawer.
My name was written across the front in blue ink—Tom—in handwriting I would have recognized anywhere. A little shakier than usual, the letters not quite as steady as the labels she used to put on everything in the garage, but unmistakably hers. My throat went dry.
“Where did you get that?”
“Your daughter brought it in last week,” Elena said quietly. “Jessica. She said she found it while helping you go through Catherine’s things.
She didn’t open it—brought it straight to me.”
I stared at the envelope. Jessica had been helping me sort through her mother’s belongings for months now, a task I couldn’t seem to finish on my own. Every box of Catherine’s clothes, every drawer of her jewelry, every stack of books she’d meant to read—it all felt like dismantling the physical evidence that she’d existed, that we’d had thirty-two years together, that our life had been real.
“She didn’t open it?” I asked. Elena shook her head. “No.
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