He hesitated. Then he handed me the delivery slip. “If you need anything, my name is there.”
I shook my head. “Thank you for stopping.”
He gave me a look that said he was curious, but that he was polite enough not to ask. Then he and the other man carried Daniel’s armchair out the front door. I watched her disappear down the sidewalk.
The strangest thing is that I felt guilty for about five seconds. Daniel loved that ugly armchair. Then I looked at the envelope. The guilt has passed.
I took it to the kitchen and placed it on the table. For a minute, I didn’t open it. I remember very clearly hearing the delivery truck start up outside. The refrigerator turned on behind me. My coffee from that morning was still by the sink because I reheated it twice and forgot about it twice. Just a typical Tuesday. That’s what gets to me when I think about it now. Nothing in the environment seemed different, but something had already changed.
I opened the envelope. The first few pages meant almost nothing to me. Financial spreadsheets, copies of forms. Some pages with the heading, “Hawthorne Property Ventures LLC.” I didn’t know what Hawthorne was. I had never heard Daniel mention that before. There was also a small brass key glued inside the envelope.
Then I found documents with my mother-in-law’s name on them: Marlene Mercer. That made me sit down. Marlene was 78 years old and had lived in the same small brick house since Daniel was in high school. She and my late father-in-law paid off the mortgage years ago. Daniel used to brag about that. “Mom doesn’t owe a penny to anyone.”
But the document in my hand mentioned financing based on the property’s value. I read the number twice. $185,000. My first thought wasn’t that Daniel was stealing from his mother. Seriously, it wasn’t. My first thought was that there must be an explanation that I didn’t understand. Perhaps Marlene was doing some renovations. Perhaps Daniel was helping her move the money. Perhaps the documents were outdated. I kept looking.
Then I found a financial spreadsheet. Daniel’s name was on it. Scott Avery’s name appeared further down. Scott was an old college friend of Daniel’s. They spoke a few times a year, usually about football, golf, and whatever business idea Scott decided was a sure bet that month. Under a section labeled “Assets and Available Equity,” I saw our address. Our home. The house that Daniel and I bought together 18 years earlier. Estimated net worth: $300,000. I stared at that line for a while.
