I got a notification on my phone that somebody had logged into our Amazon account from a device in Bowling Green, and we live forty minutes away. We’re outside Franklin, Kentucky. Married nineteen years, one account, one card, and I’m the one who orders everything. I trusted him because he’d never once asked what I spent. I went into the account to change the password, but I looked at the order history first. Mine was all there: dog food, filters, a birthday present for my sister. Then my daughter showed me the archived orders, which I didn’t even know existed. There were two hundred and eleven of them going back to 2021. Diapers. A car seat. A crib mattress. Clothes in different sizes. A backpack. Every one shipped to an apartment on Nashville Road.
The account had a second household profile with a name on it, and there was a public wish list attached. The list was titled with a child’s first name and a birthday in March of 2021. My husband died three weeks after that, in the spring, and I’d always been told he’d spent those last weeks too sick to leave the house. I called Amazon and asked when the second profile had been created. The woman said it was created in April 2021, but the first orders started before that. Then she said something that made me sit down. The payment method on every order was our card, but the shipping instructions said not to leave packages with the apartment manager.
I drove to the apartment that afternoon. I didn’t knock at first. I sat across the street and watched until a woman came outside carrying the child from the wish list’s profile picture. She looked at me, stopped walking, and then said my husband’s name before I said a word. I asked if he had been there. She said yes, every week, until the hospital. Then she told me the child was his. I asked why nobody had ever told me. She started crying and said my husband had made her promise never to contact me while he was alive. Before I left, she handed me an envelope he’d apparently left with her. Inside was a note with only one sentence: “I bought everything she needed because I knew you would find out eventually.”
