The Last Gift
The call came on a Tuesday morning while I was drinking coffee on my back deck, watching the Seattle skyline emerge through the fog over Lake Washington. Robert Hayes didn’t waste time with pleasantries. “James, I need you in my office today.
It’s about Will.”
My hand tightened around my mug until my knuckles went white. “Will’s been gone two months, Robert. Exactly sixty days.
What do you mean it’s about Will?”
“He left instructions. A package I was forbidden to give you until this exact date.”
Twenty minutes later, I was in my Lexus heading down I-405 toward downtown Bellevue, hands gripping the wheel too tightly, traffic flowing around me like I was the only car that didn’t belong. William Bennett had died on a Tuesday too.
Pancreatic cancer, stage four. Six weeks from diagnosis to death. I’d watched my best friend of forty-three years waste away in that hospice bed, his architect’s hands turning skeletal, his brilliant mind drowning in morphine.
We’d met sophomore year at Stanford, two scholarship kids in a sea of trust-fund babies. We’d built Harrison Tech out of a Silicon Valley garage—his designs, my code—and sold it fifteen years later for forty-three million dollars. We’d been best men at each other’s weddings, godfathers to each other’s kids.
Now his lawyer was calling about a “package.”
Robert’s office occupied a corner suite high enough that the windows turned Bellevue into a moving map. His secretary ushered me in with a sympathetic look. Robert walked to the large painting of Mount Rainier behind his desk, swung it open like a door, and revealed a wall safe.
“Will recorded something three weeks before he passed,” he said. “He made me swear not to give it to you until exactly sixty days after his death.”
Inside the safe was a manila envelope. My name was written on the front in Will’s precise architect’s handwriting, the letters steady even as he was dying.
Inside: a single USB drive. “Watch this at home, alone,” Robert said. “Then call me.”
My life had been normal.
Too comfortable, if I’m honest. Even after Catherine died four years earlier—a massive stroke, instantaneous, at fifty-seven. We’d just started planning retirement adventures.
Tuscany and Prague, a photography course in Barcelona, road trips through the national parks. The grief almost killed me. Eighteen months of existing rather than living.
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