I asked the supervisor to tell me the woman’s birth year. She was born in 1974, three years before I married my husband, and her state ID had my last name on it. I asked whether she’d ever personally visited the post office. The supervisor said she had — several times, always with my husband’s name written as the person who authorized her. Then she showed me the Form 1583. My husband’s signature was there, and beneath it was a second signature that looked disturbingly familiar. It wasn’t mine, but it had been witnessed by the same clerk who handled our box renewal every year.
I asked what was inside the box under her name. The supervisor said she couldn’t tell me, but she could tell me when the woman’s key had been used. Twenty-three times in the last six years, almost always on Saturdays when I was working. I asked whether she had ever removed mail addressed to me. He checked the records and said yes. Then he pulled up the forwarding information. For six years, bank statements, insurance letters, and tax documents had been going into that box under her name. I asked why someone with my last name would need a separate mailbox for our family paperwork. The supervisor looked at my husband and said, “Ma’am, I think you should ask him.”
I drove home without saying a word. My husband was already in the kitchen when I walked in, and I put the photocopy of the ID on the table. He stared at it for almost a minute before saying her first name. I had never heard it before. He said she was someone he’d known before me, and that she’d needed somewhere private to receive documents. I asked why she had my last name. He said she’d changed it years ago. Then I asked why she had access to our post-office box. He finally admitted he’d added her in 2020 because she was handling “something financial” for him. I asked what financial matter required six years of secret mail. He wouldn’t answer. So I called the post office back and asked them to check one final thing: who had originally requested the extra key in 2020. The supervisor read the request aloud — and the person who signed it wasn’t my husband. It was me.
