She held a small wooden box, the kind you find at yard sales, its lid threaded with a ribbon. Her smile was too serene to be kind—like someone who knows the punchline. ‘He told me to wait until you were ready,’ she said. My mouth dried. ‘Ready for what?’ She set the box on my porch as if setting a casserole. ‘To remember.’
I should have shut the door, called the police, called Claire, torn the papers into confetti and shoved the whole thing into the woodstove. But I’ve never been the dramatic type; grief has made me slow and careful. I let her inside because my legs wouldn’t be ordered otherwise.
She poured me tea with hands that trembled, then stopped. ‘His voice is on these,’ she said, patting the box. ‘He made them before he was—before the heart. He wanted you to hear him when you were ready to hear him without everyone else speaking over you.’
Inside the box were cassette tapes, a Walkman with an earphone, and a folded photograph: Mark with both women, the three of them laughing, looking like they’d been at a picnic instead of a registry office. I recognized the handwriting on the tape labels: Mark’s cramped, impatient script—dates, places, one label in the center: If she remembers.
My fingers shook when I pressed play. His voice came out raw, immediate, and intimate: ‘If you’re listening, then something went right and something went very wrong. There are truths I owed you. I’m so sorry.’ I sat down on my kitchen chair and let the room tilt. Memories rearranged themselves like furniture after an earthquake; a smile Claire had given me last month folded differently. The woman watched me with the look of someone who’d been carrying other people’s secrets for too long.
