The sales associate finally gave me the man’s name, and I knew it before she finished saying it. It was my husband’s younger brother, the man who died in 2019 and whose funeral I attended with the rest of the family. I told her she had to be mistaken, but she pulled up the original sales record and read me the name again. The woman who bought everything had used my ID, my Social Security number, and our old home address, but the man had signed the delivery paperwork as the person who selected the furniture. I asked where it had been delivered. She read me an address across town. I had never lived there.
I drove there the next morning because I couldn’t stop thinking about it. A woman in her forties opened the door, looked at me, and immediately said my husband’s first name. I asked whether she’d bought the bedroom set. She said yes, but she hadn’t used my identity and didn’t understand why my name was on the account. Then she asked why I was there. I told her about the furniture store and my husband’s name on the delivery ticket. She went pale and said he had been coming to the house regularly in 2021 and 2022. I told her he died in 2019. She shook her head and said she had seen him herself. Then she disappeared into the hallway and came back with a photograph from her phone.
It was my husband.
I asked her to show me the date. The photograph had been taken in her bedroom in 2022 — three years after his funeral. She said he’d told her never to contact me because I wouldn’t understand why he was still helping her. I asked what he was helping her with. She said the house, the bills, and especially the two children living upstairs. I told her my husband and I never had children. She looked at me for a long time and said, “He told me you knew about us.” Then she handed me another photograph, this one of a little boy sitting beside my husband’s old work truck. On the back was a date from 2021 and one sentence in my husband’s handwriting:
“When she finally asks, tell her why I left.”
