I stopped walking.
“What other envelope?”
“The one she didn’t give to Mr.
Hale.” Ruth’s voice dropped slightly.
“The one she asked me to hold until after the funeral.
Until after she knew whether you’d been told.”
My free hand found the roof of my car.
“How do you know I’ve been told?”
“Because Mr.
Hale called me an hour ago.
He said it went as Eleanor hoped.” Another pause.
“She prepared for both possibilities.
That’s the kind of woman she was.”
I had known Eleanor for two years.
I had sat with her twice a week.
I had married her.
And I was still learning, hour by hour, how much of herself she had kept carefully out of sight.
“Where are you?” I asked.
Ruth gave me an address twenty minutes away.
A small house on a quiet street, the kind of neighborhood where people still had flower boxes in the windows.
