214 Wills novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Every Sunday

Beth reads the wills and finds the same wording on every one, and a key turns in the apartment door.

Beth laid the wills out on our living room floor in rows of ten.

She worked fast and did not talk.

By nine o'clock the rug was covered in paper, and I was sitting on the couch with a cold cup of tea.

"Okay," she said. "Come here and look at this."

I got down on my knees beside her.

"Read the first line of the bequest on this one. Then this one. Then this one."

I read them.

I leave everything I own to Rob Garland, my first love, who has never left me.

It was the same sentence on every page.

"Callie doesn't talk like that," Beth said. "Callie says gonna. She says kinda. She said the word 'crappy' at my wedding."

"She wrote them in a hurry."

"Then why is every comma in the same place?"

I had nothing to say to that.

Beth moved her finger down the margin of the nearest page.

"And here. Look at the top corner."

In the upper right of the page there was a tiny blue check mark.

I looked at the next page. There was one there too.

There was one on every page.

"Someone read each of these," Beth said. "Someone looked at every single one and put a little check on it."

"Callie might have done it."

"She signs in black. That check is the same blue as the witness line this morning."

I stared at the blue.

I thought of Rob in the hallway, taking a slow sip of coffee.

I thought of a man who has checked two hundred and fourteen pages.

"He's got a ritual," Beth said. "That's what this is. Somebody has been making your girlfriend do this."

"You don't know that."

"I've seen it in the ER. I know what it looks like when a woman tells me she fell."

"She didn't fall, Beth. A car hit her."

"I know that, Miles."

She said it gently, and she put her hand over mine.

I pulled the first will back toward me and looked at the date.

I read it twice.

Four years ago, in October. A Sunday.

My stomach turned over.

"What?" Beth said.

"We met on a Saturday," I said. "October ninth. At the laundromat on Fenner Street. Her sleeve got caught in a dryer door and I helped her pull it out."

"And?"

"And she said yes to coffee."

"And the first will is the next day."

Beth did not say anything.

She counted on her fingers, and then she took out her phone and counted again.

"Two hundred and fourteen Sundays back from today is the Sunday after October ninth," she said. "Exactly."

I put the paper down on the rug.

The living room was very quiet.

The refrigerator hummed in the kitchen. A neighbor's television murmured through the wall.

Four years of my life had a date on it, and somebody had stamped it with a blue check mark.

"She started the week she met me," I said.

"Yes."

"Every Sunday morning she said she was at the gym," I said. "She'd come back with wet hair and a protein bar. I thought she was disciplined."

Beth put her head against my shoulder.

"Miles. The gym was a lie."

"I know."

I laughed, and it came out wrong.

Then I stood up and went to the hall closet where my work coat hung.

I pushed my hand into the inside pocket, past the keys and the notebook, and I touched the little square box.

It was still there.

I had been carrying it for three weeks.

I had been going to ask her tonight, over dinner, with the good candles.

"Don't," Beth said, from behind me. "Not yet."

"I wasn't going to."

"You were holding it like you were going to."

I put it back in the pocket.

Down the hall, a key slid into our front door.

The lock turned.

We had both locked it. I had checked it myself when we came in.

Beth stood up so fast that two rows of wills slid off her knees.

Our front door opened.

Footsteps crossed the entry mat, slow and unhurried.

Then the light in the hallway came on, and Rob Garland stood at the end of it in his navy suit, holding a set of keys with a little silver tag.

"Hi, Miles," he said gently. "I hope I'm not disturbing you."

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