Back then I thought he was just being overprotective. Maybe even jealous that I’d found someone after Catherine. Driving into my driveway in our quiet Bellevue neighborhood now, manicured lawns and American flags on porches, I wondered what Will had really seen that I hadn’t.
The house was empty when I walked in. Sophia had left for her Tuesday book club, some women’s group that met at a café in Kirkland. Dylan was supposedly at his apartment near the University of Washington campus in Seattle—an apartment I paid twelve hundred a month for and had visited exactly twice. Both times it looked more like a storage unit than a home.
I went straight to my study.
Catherine’s books still lined the mahogany shelves. First editions, travel guides, dog-eared paperbacks from decades of reading. Photos of us in Prague, Barcelona, Tokyo covered one wall—our last big year of travel when we’d thought we had decades ahead of us. Seattle and the Eastside glittered beyond the windows, the kind of view we’d once only dreamed about in our Stanford days.
I locked the door, sat at my desk, and stared at the USB drive for a full minute before plugging it into my computer.
Will’s face filled the screen, and my breath stopped.
This was Will from three weeks before the end. Gaunt and hollow-cheeked, cancer having stolen forty pounds. Oxygen tubes snaked under his nose. His skin had the waxy look of someone who has spent too much time in hospital beds.
But his eyes were clear. Sharp. Burning with the same intensity I’d seen when he stayed up three nights straight perfecting our first product design.
“Jim,” he said. His voice was thin but steady, controlled. “If you’re watching this, I’m gone, and I need you to listen very carefully.”
He paused, took a breath from the oxygen, winced at some internal pain.
“You need to trust me one more time,” he said. “Like you did when everyone said our company would fail. When we maxed out our credit cards and lived on ramen. When we bet everything on one product launch. Remember that faith?”
I nodded instinctively at the screen, my throat tight.
“I need it now,” he continued, “because what I’m about to tell you sounds insane.”
Will leaned closer to the camera. The hospice bedroom behind him blurred a little, bringing his face into sharp focus.
“Your wife, Sophia, and her son, Dylan, are planning to murder you.”
The words hit like a physical blow. For a second, my body forgot how to breathe.
My hand moved toward the mouse, finger hovering over the pause icon. This couldn’t be real. Will had been on heavy medications at the end—morphine, fentanyl, experimental painkillers that barely took the edge off. This had to be some terrible hallucination, some drug-induced nightmare he’d mistaken for reality.
But I didn’t click pause, because his eyes weren’t confused or feverish. They were the same eyes that had caught a fatal design flaw in our first prototype, that had known our VP of sales was embezzling before anyone else, that had always seen things I missed.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Will said, as if he could reach across death and read my mind. “That I was drugged out of my skull, seeing conspiracies and shadows where there aren’t any. God, brother, I wish that were true.”
His voice trembled. “I spent the last good weeks I had wishing I was wrong.”
He coughed, a wet, painful sound, and fumbled for a tissue. When he recovered, he continued.
“Six weeks ago, something started bothering me about Sophia,” he said. “Small things. The way she steered every conversation toward money. How she knew details about your accounts she shouldn’t. How Dylan watched you like—”
He swallowed hard.
“—like my cat watches birds through the window. Patient. Hungry.”
Another cough. More oxygen. He took a moment to steady himself.
“I asked Patricia’s nephew, Sam, to look into some things,” Will said. “You remember Sam Parker? Quiet guy, former Marine, does private investigation now.”
I remembered him well. Sam had come to Fourth of July barbecues at Will’s house in the Seattle suburbs, quiet in the corner, always facing the door.
“What he found…” Will’s composure cracked for a second. Raw grief and fury flashed across his face. “…what he found is on this drive.”
He gestured weakly off camera.
“Sophia’s first husband, Michael Reed,” he said. “Dead. Fell down the stairs in their Spokane home six months after making her his life insurance beneficiary. Seven hundred fifty thousand dollars. Ruled accidental.”
The coffee I’d drank that morning threatened to come back up.
“Husband before that, Thomas Carlson,” Will continued. “Dead at forty-six from a heart attack three months after their wedding. Five hundred thousand in insurance. He’d been healthy—gym guy, marathon runner, no history of heart disease. But the autopsy said natural causes. Case closed.”
Will’s hands trembled as he reached for a glass of water and sipped through a straw.
“I can’t prove those were murders,” he said. “Too long ago. Records sealed or lost. But I can prove what they’re planning for you.”
He took another breath, eyes never leaving the lens.
“There’s a folder on this drive labeled ‘Current Plot,’” he said. “Sam got audio recordings. Dylan’s an idiot. Talks on his phone like he’s invisible. They’ve been setting something up—insurance policies, timelines, someone named Victor.”
He said the name like it tasted bad.
“Second folder shows financial records,” Will added. “Sophia’s been stealing from you, Jim. Small amounts. Three thousand here, five thousand there. Offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands. She’s been patient and careful. Over three years, she’s moved two hundred thirty thousand dollars.”
Three years. Our entire marriage.
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