I called the store and asked the woman to read me the pickup name on the last order. She hesitated and then said it was a name I hadn’t heard in years. I told her to read it again, because I was sure I must have misunderstood her. It was my husband’s name. I asked how that was possible when he hadn’t been inside that store since 2009, and she said the account had been used twice a week for almost three years. Then she told me something else: the person picking up the orders never came inside, and always waited in a gray SUV at the far end of the parking lot. The license plate belonged to a woman.
I went through the order history myself and found hundreds of purchases I’d never made. Baby food, children’s medicine, cereal, school snacks, women’s clothing, and once a cake with a child’s name written on the order. The strange part was that every order had been paid with the same card attached to my account, but the card hadn’t been physically used at the store. It was all being charged through the saved payment method. I called the bank and asked when that card had first been added, and the woman said it was added in November 2022 from a device she’d never seen before. I asked for the shipping or pickup address connected to the orders, and she gave me an address on a road about twenty minutes away. I’d driven past that house hundreds of times without ever knowing who lived there.
I waited until the next Thursday and followed the gray SUV from the store. It went straight to that house, and a young woman came outside carrying the groceries. She looked at the receipt in her hand, then looked toward the SUV like she was expecting someone else. I stayed in my car until she went inside, then called the number on the account again and asked one final question: whose name was attached to the original payment authorization? The woman put me on hold for almost five minutes, then came back sounding completely different. She said the authorization had been created in person, and that my husband had signed it himself. I asked her when. She read me the date, and it was three weeks after my husband supposedly stopped going to that store — and two months after the funeral we’d held for him.
