A trio of letter trays are stacked at the very left side of the cabinet, and I flip through the contents. Work-related brochures, a yellowed Atlanta Business Chronicle with a front-page article on AppSec, tickets for the Rolling Stones concert later this summer. A neat stack of unpaid bills is on top, clipped together and labeled with a Post-it in Will’s handwriting: To Do ASAP. My heart revs up, pumping too much blood all at once, and I begin to sweat despite the chill in the room. Will isn’t dead. He’s coming back. The evidence is right here, in his distinct scrawl. A dead person can’t go to concerts or knock out to-do lists, and my meticulous husband never leaves a task unfinished.
I sit cross-legged among the papers, sifting through the binders one by one. Bank statements. Credit cards. Loans and contracts and tax returns. I’m looking for... I don’t know what. A toe-dip into the husband I thought I knew so well, any clue as to why he has suddenly morphed into the kind of man who lies.
An hour and a half later, I come across one. A fresh copy of his will, a version I’ve never seen before, updated only a month ago, and the discovery hits me like a punch in the gut. He revised his will without telling me? It’s not like we have a lot of assets. A heavily mortgaged house, a couple of car loans and not much else. Will doesn’t have any living family members, and we don’t have children. Yet. Probably. Except for the maybe-baby, our situation is pretty straightforward. I flip through the pages, searching for the reason why.
I find it on page seven: two new life insurance policies Will purchased earlier this year. Together with the one he already had, the payout adds up to a grand total of—I have to look twice to be sure—two and a half million dollars? I drop the papers onto my thighs, my head spinning with all the zeros. The amount is staggering and completely out of proportion to his mid-level salary. I know I should be glad for his preparedness, but I can’t help the new questions that poke and prod at me. Why two new policies? Why so much?
“Dare I ask?” I look up to find Dave standing in the doorway. He’s wearing his husband’s Harvard T-shirt and pajama pants, the fabric rumpled from bed, and yawning hard enough to crack his jaw. By now it’s barely seven, and Dave has never been a morning person.
“I’m searching for clues.”
“I figured as much.” He stretches his long arms up to the ceiling and twists, a noisy wringing out of his spine that makes me think of bubble wrap. “But what I meant is, dare I ask if you’ve found evidence of another life in Seattle?”
“The opposite, actually. No unusual payments, no names I don’t recognize. Only more evidence that when it comes to organization, my husband is completely anal.” I pick up the will, flip through to page seven. “Do you have a life insurance policy?”
“Yeah.”
“For how much?”
He rubs a hand over his dark hair, making it stand up in tousled tufts. “I don’t remember. Just under a million or so.”
“What about James?”
“Somewhere around the same, I think. Why?”
“Two and a half million dollars.” I shake the paper in the air between us. “Million, Dave. Doesn’t that seem extraordinarily high?”
He shrugs. “I assume you’re the beneficiary?”
“Of course,” I say, even as another question elbows its way into my consciousness. Who’s to say he didn’t purchase others, to benefit whoever’s in Seattle?
“Then, yes and no. As I recall, the calculation is something like ten times your annual salary, so, yes, the amount Will insured himself for is steep. But he loved you. He probably just wanted to make sure you’re well provided for.”
Dave’s words start a slow leak of grief, but I swallow it whole. Yes, my husband loved me, but he also lied. “Two of the policies were bought three months ago.”
His head jerks up, and his brows slide into a sharp V. “That’s either an incredible coincidence or incredibly creepy. I can’t decide.”
“I’m going for creepy.”
He sinks onto a chair and scrubs his face. “Okay, let’s think this through. Life insurance doesn’t come for free, and an amount that big would have cost him a hundred bucks or more a month.”
I point to the pile of binders, one of them containing this year’s bank statements. “Well, he didn’t pay for it from our mutual account. I combed through every single statement and didn’t find anything but a shocking amount of Starbucks charges.”
“Could he have another bank account?”
“It’s possible, I guess. But if it’s not here, how do I find it?”
“His computer. Emails, bookmarks, history files. Things like that.”
“Will never goes anywhere without his laptop. Ditto for phone and iPad.”
“Can you log in to his email?”
I shake my head. “No way. Will isn’t like us, people who still use the name of their childhood dog as a password. He uses those computer-generated log-ins that are impossible to crack, and a different one for everything.”
“Even for Facebook?”
“Especially for Facebook. Do you know how often social media accounts get hacked? All the freaking time. Next thing you know, all fifteen hundred of your Twitter followers are getting DMs from you hocking fake Ray-Bans.”
Will would be so proud. They’re his words, the ones he preached to me when I told him rocky321 is my password for everything. Now they roll right off my tongue.
I sigh, looking around at the messy piles of papers and binders. There are no more answers in these, that much is certain. I scoot forward on my knees, begin shoving everything back into the cabinet.
“You know the next place I’d look if I wanted to find my husband’s secrets? And I tell you this at the risk of confirming every stereotype you’ve ever heard about gay men.”
I reach for another binder, glancing over my shoulder at my brother, and we say the words in unison.
“His closet.”
*
Will’s closet is a neat, orderly world where each item is organized by color and grouped by category. Work shirts, pressed and starched and buttoned. A row of pants with pleats sharp enough to slice bread. Jeans and T-shirts and polos, every hanger matching and perfectly spaced. I pull on the top drawer handle, and it opens to reveal his boxers, rolled into tight Tootsie Rolls and stacked in even rows.
This is Will’s domain, and he’s everywhere I look. I stand here for a moment, drinking him in like wine, feeling a quivering ache take hold in my stomach. I sense him in the orderliness, in his preference for soft fabrics and rich jewel tones, in the scent of spicy soap and mint. Like I could turn around and there he’d be, smiling that smile that makes him look younger and older at the same time. The first time he aimed it at me in a rainy Kroger parking lot, I liked it so much I agreed to a cup of coffee, even though he’d just rammed his car into my bumper.
“You could have just asked for my number, you know,” I teased him a few days later, as he was walking me to the door after our first official date. “Our fenders didn’t have to take such a beating.”
“How else was I supposed to get your attention? You were driving away.”
I laughed. “Poor, innocent fenders.”
“A worthy sacrifice.” He kissed me then, and I knew he was right.
“You okay?” Dave says now, his tone gentle.
I nod, not trusting my voice.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” He searches my face with a concerned gaze. “You don’t have to help, you know.”
“I know, but I want to.” He doesn’t look convinced, so I add, “I need to.”