Grief will do that.
It takes the person you trusted most and, because they are no longer there to defend themselves, it lets your worst fears put words in their mouth.
Then one evening, just after I’d put Lily to bed, there was a knock at the door.
I opened it.
And it was her.
The woman from the footage.
She was thin, and tired, and her eyes were already wet before I said a word.
She held out a worn envelope with my name on the front in Jack’s unmistakable handwriting.
“He asked me to give you this only after he was gone,” she said. “Not before. He made me promise.”
My hands were shaking.
“What is it?” I asked. “Who are you?”
She looked at me for a long moment, and then she said quietly:
“So you don’t know what he left you, do you?”
I opened the envelope right there in the doorway, under the porch light, with the cold air coming in around us.
