The Marriage Lie. Kimberly Belle

in a round hole. Will wouldn’t cheat. He wouldn’t.

      Then, what? Why lie?

      I twist around on the bed, groping in the early-morning light for his empty pillow. I press the cool cotton to my face and inhale the scent of my husband, and memories swell in razor-sharp flashes of lucidity. Will’s square jaw, lit up from below by his laptop screen. The way his hair was always mussed on one side from running a hand up it, an unconscious habit when he was thinking about something. That smile of his whenever I came into the room, the one that no one else ever got but me. More than anything, the sensation of how it felt to be whole and to be his, what it felt like to be us.

      I need my husband. I need his sleep-warmed body and his thermal touch and his voice whispering in my ear, calling me his very favorite person. I close my eyes and there he is, lying in the bed next to me, bare chested and a finger crooked in invitation, and an empty heaviness fills my chest. Will’s dead. He’s gone, and now, so am I.

      The fresh wound reopens with a searing hot pain, and I can’t stay in this bed—our bed—for another second. I kick off the covers, slip on Will’s robe and head down the stairs.

      In the living room, I flip the wall switch and pause while my eyes adjust to the sudden light. When they do, it’s like looking at a picture of my and Will’s life, frozen the moment before he left for the airport. His sci-fi paperback, its pages dog-eared and curling up at the corners, sits on the side table by his favorite chair, next to a mini mountain of cellophane candy wrappers I’m always nagging him to pick up. I smile at the same time I feel the tears build, but I blink them away, because one little word is slicing through my memories like a machete.

      Why?

      I push away from the wall and head over to the bookshelves.

      When we moved into the house last year, Will nixed the idea of a home office. “A techie doesn’t need a desk,” he said at the time, “only a laptop with a multi-core processor and a place to perch. But if you want one, go for it.” I didn’t want one. I liked to perch wherever Will did, at the kitchen counter, on the couch, in a shady spot on the back deck. The desk in the living room became a spot for sorting mail, storing pens and paper clips, and displaying our favorite framed photographs—snapshots of happier times. I turn my back to the desk so I can’t see.

      But inevitably, home ownership comes with a paper trail, and Will stored ours in the living room built-ins. I kneel on the floor, yank open the doors and marvel at a display worthy of a Container Store catalog. Colorful rows of matching three-ring binders, their contents marked with matching printed labels. Everything is ordered and grouped by year. I pull the binders out, laying them across the hardwoods by priority. Where would be the most likely place to find another lie?

      A trio of letter trays are stacked at the very left side of the cabinet, and I flip through the contents. Work-related brochures, a yellowed Atlanta Business Chronicle with a front-page article on AppSec, tickets for the Rolling Stones concert later this summer. A neat stack of unpaid bills is on top, clipped together and labeled with a Post-it in Will’s handwriting: To Do ASAP. My heart revs up, pumping too much blood all at once, and I begin to sweat despite the chill in the room. Will isn’t dead. He’s coming back. The evidence is right here, in his distinct scrawl. A dead person can’t go to concerts or knock out to-do lists, and my meticulous husband never leaves a task unfinished.

      I sit cross-legged among the papers, sifting through the binders one by one. Bank statements. Credit cards. Loans and contracts and tax returns. I’m looking for... I don’t know what. A toe-dip into the husband I thought I knew so well, any clue as to why he has suddenly morphed into the kind of man who lies.

      An hour and a half later, I come across one. A fresh copy of his will, a version I’ve never seen before, updated only a month ago, and the discovery hits me like a punch in the gut. He revised his will without telling me? It’s not like we have a lot of assets. A heavily mortgaged house, a couple of car loans and not much else. Will doesn’t have any living family members, and we don’t have children. Yet. Probably. Except for the maybe-baby, our situation is pretty straightforward. I flip through the pages, searching for the reason why.

      I find it on page seven: two new life insurance policies Will purchased earlier this year. Together with the one he already had, the payout adds up to a grand total of—I have to look twice to be sure—two and a half million dollars? I drop the papers onto my thighs, my head spinning with all the zeros. The amount is staggering and completely out of proportion to his mid-level salary. I know I should be glad for his preparedness, but I can’t help the new questions that poke and prod at me. Why two new policies? Why so much?

      “Dare I ask?” I look up to find Dave standing in the doorway. He’s wearing his husband’s Harvard T-shirt and pajama pants, the fabric rumpled from bed, and yawning hard enough to crack his jaw. By now it’s barely seven, and Dave has never been a morning person.

      “I’m searching for clues.”

      “I figured as much.” He stretches his long arms up to the ceiling and twists, a noisy wringing out of his spine that makes me think of bubble wrap. “But what I meant is, dare I ask if you’ve found evidence of another life in Seattle?”

      “The opposite, actually. No unusual payments, no names I don’t recognize. Only more evidence that when it comes to organization, my husband is completely anal.” I pick up the will, flip through to page seven. “Do you have a life insurance policy?”

      “Yeah.”

      “For how much?”

      He rubs a hand over his dark hair, making it stand up in tousled tufts. “I don’t remember. Just under a million or so.”

      “What about James?”

      “Somewhere around the same, I think. Why?”

      “Two and a half million dollars.” I shake the paper in the air between us. “Million, Dave. Doesn’t that seem extraordinarily high?”

      He shrugs. “I assume you’re the beneficiary?”

      “Of course,” I say, even as another question elbows its way into my consciousness. Who’s to say he didn’t purchase others, to benefit whoever’s in Seattle?

      “Then, yes and no. As I recall, the calculation is something like ten times your annual salary, so, yes, the amount Will insured himself for is steep. But he loved you. He probably just wanted to make sure you’re well provided for.”

      Dave’s words start a slow leak of grief, but I swallow it whole. Yes, my husband loved me, but he also lied. “Two of the policies were bought three months ago.”

      His head jerks up, and his brows slide into a sharp V. “That’s either an incredible coincidence or incredibly creepy. I can’t decide.”

      “I’m going for creepy.”

      He sinks onto a chair and scrubs his face. “Okay, let’s think this through. Life insurance doesn’t come for free, and an amount that big would have cost him a hundred bucks or more a month.”

      I point to the pile of binders, one of them containing this year’s bank statements. “Well, he didn’t pay for it from our mutual account. I combed through every single statement and didn’t find anything but a shocking amount of Starbucks charges.”

      “Could he have another bank account?”

      “It’s possible, I guess. But if it’s not here, how do I find it?”

      “His computer. Emails, bookmarks, history files. Things like that.”

      “Will never goes anywhere without his laptop. Ditto for phone and iPad.”

      “Can you log in to his email?”

      I shake my head. “No way. Will isn’t like us, people who still use the name of their childhood dog as a password. He uses those computer-generated log-ins that are impossible to crack, and a different one for everything.”

      “Even for Facebook?”