After my wife died, I thought my world had shrunk down to a paid-off brick house on the South Side of Chicago, a stack of pension checks, and the empty half of our bed that still smelled faintly of her lavender soap. In the mornings, I still reached for the warm shape that wasn’t there. Her cardigans hung in the closet.
Her chipped blue mug sat upside down on the dish rack. I told myself the rest of my life would be small: grocery lists, crossword puzzles, the senior discount at the pharmacy, the quiet routines of a man the world had already walked past. I thought that was all there was left for me.
I was wrong. My wife, Evelyn, had lived two lives. There was the one I knew: forty-two years of shared coffee, PTA meetings, and her coming home from “IT work” at the school district with dust on her skirt and stories about jammed printers and teachers who refused to learn how to restart their computers.
The other life, the one she never let me see, was inside glass towers and polished boardrooms, where she designed software for banks, negotiated equity like she was bargaining over yard-sale prices, and moved numbers that quietly stacked themselves into the millions. When she died, I didn’t just inherit the quiet life I recognized. I inherited the empire I’d never been allowed to see.
My son, Dan, only cared about the empire. We buried Evelyn on a gray Thursday in November. The Chicago sky sagged low over the cemetery, heavy and flat, like someone had dragged a piece of chalk across the whole city.
I spent the funeral half-weeping and half-worrying whether everyone had enough chairs and whether there’d be enough coffee in the fellowship hall. Focusing on cups and parking spaces kept me from thinking about the fact that I’d have to go home and sleep in a bed that was suddenly twice as big. Dan stood beside me, tall and handsome in a tailored black suit that probably cost more than my first car.
His dark hair was styled just so, his tan courtesy of a golf trip he’d taken the month before. To anyone else, he looked like a devoted son. I saw the way his leg bounced when the pastor talked too long.
I saw his eyes drift toward the parking lot when people lined up to share memories, calculating exits instead of listening. His wife, Brenda, dabbed at her eyes with a monogrammed handkerchief, making sure the small crowd could see every delicate motion. Her mascara never smudged.
Her diamond bracelet flashed whenever she reached out to touch someone’s arm in practiced sympathy. “You should sit, Richard,” she murmured at one point, adjusting my coat without asking, as if my own body belonged to her schedule. A week later, I sat in a downtown office that looked like the set of a movie about billionaires.
The skyscraper we entered scraped the clouds. The elevator rose so smoothly it felt like we were being poured upward. When the doors opened, the air smelled like expensive coffee and something colder underneath, the quiet metallic tang of money.
The reception area had walls of dark wood and art that didn’t look like anything in particular, which meant it was very, very expensive. A young man in a perfect suit offered us bottled water with a label I didn’t recognize. I wore my funeral suit again, the same one Evelyn had bought me fifteen years ago for our neighbor’s wedding.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
Tap READ MORE to discover the rest 🔎👇
