At My Husband’s Funeral, I Opened His Casket to Place a Flower — and Found a Crumpled Note Tucked Under His Hands

He answered fast. “Ev?”

“I need your help. And I need you to believe me.”

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I told him everything. The note. The cameras. What Susan had said. What I’d read in the journal. He went quiet.

“Peter?” I whispered.

“I’ll help you find out what’s real.”

“I believe you,” he said finally. “I knew Ray. If he’d had kids with someone else, he wouldn’t have been able to hide it. He was a terrible liar.”

A weak laugh escaped me.

“I’ll help you find out what’s real,” he said. “You deserve that.”

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***

The following afternoon, he sent his son, Ben.

“I’ll lose my temper if I go,” Peter told me. “Ben’s calmer.”

“You don’t owe anyone proof.”

Ben was 17. Tall, polite, a little awkward. He stopped by my house first.

“I can back out if you want,” he said. “You don’t owe anyone proof.”

“I owe it to myself. And to Greg.”

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Peter had already dug up Susan’s address from old vendor paperwork. Ben drove over.

When he came back an hour later, we sat at my kitchen table. My hands were wrapped around a mug of tea I wasn’t drinking.

“This girl opened the door. Teenager.”

“Tell me everything,” I said.

“So,” he said, “I knocked. This girl opened the door. Teenager. Pajama pants, messy bun. I asked for her dad.”

I pictured it as he talked.

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“She yelled for him,” Ben went on. “Guy in his 50s comes to the door. I told him, ‘I’m here because of something your wife said at a funeral yesterday.'”