I told my son his father just died. He said, «It’s my wife’s birthday». Weeks later! He got a letter from my lawyer . He read it and froze…

I didn’t want to beg for attendance at a funeral, especially not for Gerald’s. Not when he was the one who stayed up all night with a colicky Nathan, who spent weekends building Lego cities and teaching him how to balance a checkbook by age 12. And not when Gerald called Nathan the night before he died and never got a call back.

People noticed. Of course they did. The whispers started before the service even began.

Where’s Nathan? Did he miss his flight? Is Megan okay? Like they were the ones we should be worried about. Even Gerald’s college friend Frank leaned over and said, I thought your boy would be front and center today. And I just nodded like it wasn’t breaking me in half.

But the moment that really shattered me came after the service when one of Gerald’s co-workers, Brian, approached me by the coffee urn in the fellowship hall and said, I don’t mean to pry, but Gerald mentioned something odd in passing last. Month about helping Nathan out financially seemed stressed about it. That stopped me cold, because Gerald never told me anything like that.

We had no secrets, or so I thought. I didn’t ask Brian to elaborate. I just smiled.

Thanked him for coming, and excused myself to the restroom where I sat on the toilet seat lid, and stared at the floor until someone knocked, asking if everything was okay. Everything was not okay. My son missed his father’s funeral.

For a brunch and a weekend getaway, and now I was hearing hints of financial stress and secrecy. When I got home that night, the silence in the house was unbearable. I poured myself a glass of wine, stared at Gerald’s armchair, and tried not to think about how cold and alone I felt.

Then I opened my phone and saw a photo Megan had posted. On Instagram, her in a bright pink dress holding a mimosa captioned, best birthday ever, love my hubby. It had been posted during the funeral.

During the eulogy, I stared at the screen until the image blurred and my hands started to shake. That night I couldn’t sleep. I lay in our bed, reaching instinctively for the weight of Gerald’s hand beside me, and came up empty.

At around 3 AM, I got up, opened Gerald’s desk drawer, and started pulling out paperwork, bank statements, insurance records, old receipts, anything that might explain what Brian had said, because now it wasn’t just grief. Now, there was something else, something colder, a sense that maybe I didn’t know the full story of my own family, and the one person who could have answered everything, Gerald, was gone. The next morning I woke up with a mission, not out of curiosity, but out of something sharper, something closer to rage disguised as grief.

And I went straight to Gerald’s filing cabinet, the one he kept locked, but always said I had the spare, key for, which I did, taped to the back of our wedding photo in the closet, like some quaint little gesture of trust that now felt more like a test. I opened the drawer and started going through folders, thick with years of tax returns, retirement plans, bank statements organized by month and year like a man who never expected to die mid-sentence. It didn’t take long to find it, a slim, blue folder labeled Nathan Transfers…