“What do you mean you weren’t finished?” she asked.
Mr. Morrison turned one final page, then reached for a sealed cream envelope that had been lying beneath the folder since we sat down. I had noticed it earlier because grief makes the mind attach itself to useless details. The envelope was thick, heavy, and addressed in my son’s handwriting.
I knew David’s handwriting before my brain could accept what it was seeing.
My son had written in a firm, practical slant, letters leaning slightly right as if they had somewhere to be. When he was seven, his teacher told me his handwriting was “aggressively determined.” He never outgrew that. Even as a man, even signing mortgage forms and birthday cards and notes taped to the refrigerator, David wrote like he was building a small fence around meaning.
Mr. Morrison broke the seal.
The sound of paper tearing seemed too loud.
Stephanie’s smile disappeared.
Marcus leaned forward.
And I, who had spent the last two weeks being moved from hospital to church to cemetery to hotel to lawyer’s office like a package nobody knew where to store, suddenly felt my heart begin to pound.
Before I tell you what was in that envelope, you need to know what Stephanie thought she had taken from me.
