My husband died yesterday, and this morning, $120,000 appeared in my bank account. At first, I thought it was a mistake. I was standing barefoot in the kitchen of our house in Oak Brook, Illinois, with the coffee machine hissing behind me and the morning news running soundlessly on the television.
Outside the bay window, the maple trees along the driveway were still wet from the rain that had fallen overnight. A small American flag Richard had insisted on putting near the porch moved gently in the damp wind. The house felt too large without him.
It had always been too large, really, but when Richard was alive, his presence filled the rooms even when he was silent. His cane by the fireplace. His reading glasses on the side table.
His shirts folded in the laundry room. His voice calling my name from the study, never loudly, but with the expectation that I would come. Now there was only the hum of appliances and the cold glow of my phone.
Transfer completed: $120,000. No note. No explanation.
Just the number. For nearly a full minute, I did not blink. Then the phone rang.
Matthew. Richard’s son. Not my son, he had reminded me often enough, though I had raised him from the time he was five.
I answered with the phone still trembling in my hand. “Claire.”
His voice was polished and flat, the way it became when he wanted to sound like his father. “Matthew,” I said.
There was traffic behind him. A horn. The muffled rush of a city morning.
He was probably already downtown, wearing one of his expensive suits, walking into a building where everyone treated him like a man who had earned what he had simply been handed. “You saw the transfer?” he asked. I looked at the screen again.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
The word sat there between us. Not warm. Not relieved.
Good, like a box had been checked. “Then this should be easier,” he said. I turned away from the window.
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