…”sick for as long as you think. He knew for a year. And he wasn’t of sound mind when he changed his will. I’m going to court.”
I didn’t let him in. I closed the door, locked it and called my best friend. Then I sat down on the stairs and reread the texts.
They’d come from Ben’s number. But Ben’s phone was in a drawer in our bedroom. I’d turned it off after the funeral. I went upstairs and turned it on. On the home screen was a notification: “Scheduled messages: 3 sent, 2 pending.”
My husband had written them before he died. He’d scheduled them to arrive three days after the funeral. He’d known his brother would come.
Ben was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer fourteen months before he died. He told me five months before the end. I’d been furious that he’d waited. He’d said he wanted us to have a normal year first. Now I understood he’d been doing something else with that time too.
The two pending messages came that night, at 9 p.m.
“The suit is at my office. Third drawer of the filing cabinet. I moved it there in October because I knew Rick had a key to the house. Take Sarah with you.”
Sarah was his business partner.
“I love you. Don’t let him make you doubt that, or me. — B.”
The next morning, Sarah and I drove to the office. The blue suit was in a garment bag in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. Inside the jacket pocket was a USB drive, a sealed envelope and a letter in Ben’s handwriting.
The letter explained everything. For six years, Ben and his brother, Rick, had run their late father’s hardware business together. Two years ago, Ben noticed money missing. A lot of it. He hired an accountant quietly. Rick had taken almost $400,000 from the company. When Ben confronted him, Rick begged him not to go to the police. Ben agreed to keep quiet if Rick paid it back. Rick never did.
When Ben got sick, he changed his will. He left his half of the business to me, and he wrote a sworn statement, notarized and witnessed by his doctor, confirming he was of completely sound mind when he did it. That was in the envelope. The accountant’s full report was on the USB drive.
“Rick’s going to come for the business,” the letter said. “He’ll say I wasn’t thinking clearly. He’ll say I was on medication. He’ll say whatever he needs to. Give this to Sarah and a lawyer. And then go live your life, okay? You’ve spent a year taking care of me. It’s your turn.”
I sat in Ben’s office chair and cried for an hour. Sarah sat with me the whole time.
Rick did file a challenge to the will. Our lawyer sent his lawyer a copy of the sworn statement and the accountant’s report. Rick’s lawyer withdrew from the case the next day. The district attorney opened an embezzlement investigation a month later.
The black box Rick had been holding on my porch? I found out later it was Ben’s old pocket watch, which Rick had taken from our house during the funeral reception. He’d planned to give it back, “as a gesture,” right before asking me to sign over the business.
I got the watch back in the end. It’s on my nightstand. Every night, I wind it before I go to sleep. Ben used to do that. Now I do.
