Then an elderly man entered carrying a green backpack, worn soft at the seams like it had traveled a long way to reach me.
“Camille?” he asked. “I’m Gerald Okafor, your husband’s attorney. He left this for you.”
He placed it in my hands.
It was much heavier than I expected.
It was much heavier than I expected.
Gerald watched my reaction for a long moment before lowering his voice.
“Bennett wasn’t entirely who you thought he was, Camille,” he said quietly. “He wanted you to know the truth. All of it. He asked me to make sure you actually heard it from me, in person, rather than finding it on your own inside that bag.”
He wanted you to know the truth. All of it.
I sat down in the same chair I’d occupied for a week straight, the backpack heavy in my lap.
“What do you mean, he wasn’t who I thought he was?”
Gerald pulled a second chair close, the vinyl squeaking under his weight.
“Bennett built a small fortune off two patents in the seventies,” he said. “Sold the firm decades ago for considerably more than most people in this town would guess, looking at how modestly he lived those last years. There’s just over two hundred and thirty thousand dollars in assets documented in that bag — savings bonds, a key to a safety deposit box, and the deed to a rental property he’s owned outright since before you were born.”
