The lawyer waited exactly forty minutes before he came to find me. I remember because I counted the ceiling tiles instead of counting the minutes — because looking at numbers felt safer than looking at the bed where my husband had just stopped breathing.
“Sarah.” His voice was careful, the way people talk to something breakable. He set a scuffed green backpack in my lap, the same one that had rested against Thomas’s foot every day I’d known him. “He wanted you to have this. He said… he said you’d understand him better once you looked inside.”
I stared at the zipper pull instead of his face. “Understand him how? We were married for seven days. I thought I already—”
“He wasn’t who you thought he was,” the lawyer said. Not cruelly. Almost like an apology. Then he left me alone with the pillow that still held the shape of Thomas’s head, the untouched peppermint tea going cold on the tray table, and a soda-can tab circling my finger — light as a joke, heavy as a vow.
