Her husband looked at his plate first. Then my daughter said, “I know about it.” I waited. She put her fork down and admitted she’d requested the policy because the insurance company told her there was a problem with the beneficiary information. She said she’d never received the copy they supposedly mailed her, but she knew the amount and the date. I asked how she knew. She looked at her husband, and he wouldn’t look back.
That night she came to my house alone. She brought the envelope she’d received from the insurer months earlier. Inside was a photocopy of the original policy and a handwritten note from my husband that I had never seen. He’d changed the beneficiary three months before he died. My daughter was still listed, but only as a secondary beneficiary. The primary beneficiary was someone neither of us knew. Then she told me her husband had been asking questions about the policy long before my husband died.
The next morning I called the insurance company and asked for every document connected to the policy. They sent me the change request, the signature, and the date it had been submitted. My husband’s signature was on it — but the witness signature belonged to my son-in-law. I called my daughter and told her what I’d found. She was silent for almost a minute, then whispered, “Mom, don’t confront him. Because the person listed as the beneficiary isn’t a stranger. It’s the woman he told me died years ago.”
