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I stopped in the hallway and pressed a hand against the wall.
“Diane?” he called from the kitchen. “Did you hear me?”
“I heard you,” I said.
Whatever Evelyn had hidden, my husband wanted it. And whatever it was, she’d wanted me to have it first.
“Did you hear me?”
***
The morning after Michael’s ultimatum, I made him coffee as if nothing had changed.
“I’ll need a few weeks,” I told him quietly. “To sort through my things.”
He looked surprised, then relieved. “That’s reasonable.”
I watched him leave for work and waited until his car was gone from the driveway.
Then I walked straight to Evelyn’s old bedroom.
“I’ll need a few weeks.”
***
The first search turned up nothing.
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I checked my MIL’s closet, the old hatboxes, and the shoeboxes under the bed. I lifted the mattress. I felt along the seams of her wingback chair until my fingers ached.
Two hours into my search, I sat down on the carpet and almost laughed at myself. I was a grieving woman chasing the whispers of a dying woman on morphine.
I lifted the mattress.
The diagnosis had only come the previous spring, though Michael said she’d been slipping for a couple of years before that. But before the fall, before the hospital bed in the front room, Evelyn had been sharp enough to balance her own checkbook and argue with the news.
As I sat there on the carpet, I wondered how much she’d understood during those earlier days that I’d mistaken for ordinary quiet.
I called Ruth that afternoon.
I wondered how much she’d understood.
“He said what?” My friend’s voice sharpened on the other end. “Diane, listen to me carefully. Don’t sign anything. Not one page.”
“I haven’t.”
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“And your MIL. You really think she meant something by it?”
I hesitated. “I don’t know anymore.”
“Then look again,” Ruth said. “Look harder. And find yourself an attorney before that man finds a new lock for the front door.”
Ruth wasn’t wrong.
“He said what?”
***
Four days later, I came home from the grocery store and tried the door to Michael’s home office. The key wouldn’t turn. He’d quietly replaced the doorknob.
***
That night at dinner, my husband watched me over his plate.
“Have you looked at the divorce papers yet?”
“I’ve been reading it.”
“There’s nothing to read, Diane. It’s straightforward.”
“I’ve been reading it.”
“More than three decades isn’t straightforward, Michael.”
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His jaw tightened. “Don’t make this harder than it needs to be. I’d like this done before the end of the month.”
I set my fork down. “I’ll sign when I’m ready.”
My husband didn’t answer. But I saw the way his eyes flicked toward the hallway, toward Evelyn’s closed bedroom door. And I knew.
He was looking for something too. Or he had been.
“I’ll sign when I’m ready.”
I remembered the weekend after the funeral, when he’d shut himself in that room for a whole day. I remembered the sound of drawers sliding and furniture being dragged across the floor. He’d told me he was sorting her things for donation.
Michael had torn that room apart more than once. As far as he was concerned, there was nothing left in it to find.
***
For the second search, I changed tactics.
I waited until Saturday, when Michael left for what he called a “long overdue” round of golf.
I remembered the sound of drawers sliding.
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I went straight to Evelyn’s vanity, the one she’d brought from her mother’s house decades ago.
