My attorney opened the box carefully and pulled out a stack of bank statements, all from an account I had never seen. The account had been opened six months after we got married, and every month for twenty-nine years, money had been transferred into it from our joint account. I stared at the totals, trying to understand how much of our life had been quietly moved somewhere I couldn’t see.
Then she found the document underneath everything else. It was a trust agreement, dated three weeks after our second anniversary. My husband had named himself the sole beneficiary, but the part that made my attorney stop was the list of assets attached to it. Our house was there. His business was there. Even the savings account I thought we shared was listed.
I asked her what it meant, and she looked at me for a long moment before saying, “It means he didn’t just decide he didn’t love you anymore.” Then she turned the last page toward me. My signature was at the bottom — dated thirty years ago — but I had never seen the document, never signed it, and never even known the trust existed.
