Vince asked whether I still remembered the funeral. I said yes, and he was quiet for a few seconds before asking whether I remembered the woman he’d been standing beside. I told him I did, and he said, “That was my wife. The woman everyone says can’t be around people.” Then he told me she’d died three years ago, and my husband had been one of the last people to speak to her. I asked why nobody had told me. Vince said, “Because your husband asked me not to.”
I sat down because my hands had started shaking. Vince said the audit hadn’t uncovered missing money from the company—it uncovered payments my husband had been making for years to an account in his wife’s name. He’d been paying her medical bills, her apartment, and eventually her care, and Vince had agreed to keep the arrangement secret because my husband said she’d never forgive him if she knew. I asked why my husband had been doing that for nineteen years. Vince answered, “Because he was the reason she needed the money in the first place.”
Then Vince told me what happened at that funeral in 2011. His wife had recognized my husband immediately, even though he hadn’t introduced himself. She had walked over to him and asked one question that made him leave the room without saying goodbye. Vince said, “She asked him whether he’d ever told you what happened that night.” I asked him what night. He said he couldn’t tell me over the phone, but he’d bring me the file my husband had kept hidden since 2011. Then he added, “There are nineteen Christmas dinners you remember differently than they actually happened.”
