I called the recovery email address from the account file. A man answered, and before I could say Rita’s name he asked whether I’d found the envelope yet. I said I didn’t know what he meant. He told me Rita had left instructions that someone in the family would eventually find a folder and that he was supposed to contact me when that happened. I asked who he was. He said his name was Martin and that he’d handled some paperwork for Rita after her divorce. Then he told me the messages weren’t from her account for memories at all. They were being sent because someone was trying to find out which family members knew about a second bank account.
I asked him why Rita would have left instructions like that. He said she’d discovered someone was accessing her finances while she was still alive. She had started saving screenshots, receipts, and copies of statements in a folder at her house. I remembered the old filing cabinet in her spare bedroom, the one everyone had assumed was full of tax papers. I drove over and opened it. Behind the tax folders was a sealed envelope with my name on it. Inside was a handwritten note from Rita dated two weeks before she died. She wrote that if anyone ever contacted the family through her Facebook account after her death, I was not to trust the person asking questions — because the person already had access to everything she owned.
I called Martin back and read him the final line. He went silent and then asked me whether the recovery email was still attached to the account. I said yes. He told me to look at the address carefully. I did. It wasn’t Rita’s, and it wasn’t his. It was an email address I recognized because I’d seen it on my own sister’s bank paperwork years earlier. I called the bank immediately and asked whether Rita had ever listed an emergency contact under that address. The woman checked the file, then asked me to sit down. She said the address belonged to someone who had been added to Rita’s account three days before her death — and the name attached to it was my own.
