He stood on my porch for a long time before finally asking, “Do you remember the night your husband left?” I almost laughed because of all the things I’d expected him to ask, that wasn’t one of them. I told him I remembered every minute. He looked toward his house, then back at me. “Did he ever tell you where he was going that night?” I said no. He nodded slowly and asked whether I’d ever wondered why my husband had left without taking his wallet, his watch, or the car.
I told him I’d spent two years wondering about everything. My neighbor looked relieved, but then he said something that made my stomach turn. He’d been awake that night because his wife had been sick, and around midnight he’d seen my husband standing beside his truck across the street. But he wasn’t alone. There had been another man with him, and they’d argued for almost twenty minutes before driving away together. My neighbor said he’d never told me because the other man had threatened him the next morning.
Then he reached into his jacket and handed me a folded piece of paper. “I kept this because I didn’t know what else to do,” he said. It was a receipt from a storage facility dated two days after my husband disappeared, and the name on the account wasn’t my husband’s. It was mine. I stared at it and told him I had never rented a storage unit. He looked at me and whispered, “I know. That’s why I waited four months before asking you this — because the unit is still being paid for, and someone has been going there every Thursday at seven.”
