Chapter 39 Sara Batcher
Sara Batcher
“Our office prepared the prenup for David and Sara back when they were wed. It was pretty standard for California. All assets prior to the marriage stayed the property of that respective spouse. Any assets generated or acquired during the marriage would be divided equally at the time of dissolution. And it was during our setup of the prenup that the life insurance policies were purchased. Five million dollars each. I know she’s got money, but still.
No one’s turning down a five-million-dollar opportunity. ”
In the attic were all of David’s things.
Sara pulled the chain, illuminating the space, and stared at the neat rows of cardboard boxes.
Each one was labeled and had a printed list of the contents taped to the side of it.
The beauty of money. It made everything easy, including the organization of a dead man’s life.
Sara slowly walked down the aisle between the boxes, her bright-white sneakers quiet on the padded rubber floor. She had showered after the police station, and used a pomegranate body scrub until her skin felt raw. It hadn’t removed the feel of the place.
She shivered, her hair still wet from the shower, twisted up and in a clip, exposing her neck to the frigid blast from the attic’s air-conditioning, which had its own system for the five-thousand-square-foot space.
She tucked her hands into the sleeves of her sweatshirt and crossed her arms tightly over her chest, trying to stay warm.
Now that she knew for sure that David wasn’t coming back, she should get rid of this stuff.
There were companies for this, estate-management firms that would know what to do with his baseball card collection and his vintage espresso machine.
They could come up here and, within a matter of hours, get rid of all of it.
And maybe one day she would be ready for that.
But right now, she wasn’t. She got to the end of the row and crouched down, looking for the box that she wanted.
It had been a few years since she had put it up here, but to the best of her recollection it was—there.
She spotted the box without the printed list on the outside, the one that was simply labeled Research—David in permanent marker.
She opened the lid, and there, beside his computer and his address book, was her notepad.
It was a black Moleskine journal–style pad, with a band that kept it closed.
She moved it to one side and pulled out a hunter-green cashmere sweater.
Holding it to her nose, she inhaled, desperate for a bit of David’s scent.
It was gone. She tried again, in a different place in the fabric, but there was nothing there, and that’s where heartache hid—in the absence. The lonely void. “I miss you,” she whispered quietly, into the sweater. “I miss you so much.”
This time, when the tears came, she didn’t wipe them away.
She let them fall, the salty drops running down the curve of her jaw, a few droplets hitting the interior of the box as she sifted through the few remaining items. A few bottles of pills.
His favorite coffee cup. One of his watches.
She made a note to ask the police if they’d found a watch and his wedding ring.
Would they turn those over to her? She hoped so.
She looked down at her own hand and rubbed her thumb over the platinum band.
It was a thin strip of diamonds, and something she should have stopped wearing years ago.
She had considered taking it off when the insurance company issued their payout.
Having a third party agree that he was dead, that had felt like a monumental moment that she should recognize, formal permission to stop being a wife—but she had decided to leave it on a little longer.
A little longer that had turned into three more years.
Now it was probably the right time. She studied the ring and left it on. Maybe tonight, when she went to bed. Maybe.
She would need to buy a casket. Get a headstone. Did people hold funerals in this situation? Probably not, though she felt like she should. Maybe she would do something small, just here at the house. A celebration of life—that was what they’d done at the company when Stanford in HR died last June.
She picked up David’s address book and thumbed through it.
Some of the names she recognized and could invite to a memorial.
Most she didn’t. She and David had, in many ways, been two separate silos, connected by sex and meals.
Roommates who ate and slept together and fought the remainder of the time.
In the last few years, they had avoided each other except for a few nights and a few dinners each week.
Were most marriages that way? She didn’t know. She had no basis for comparison.
Her last memory of him was a fight. He’d been getting dressed in the morning and she was in bed, and he asked her to get his razor, which was just a few bathroom drawers away.
And she had snapped at him to get it himself, and he said that she didn’t need to sleep any later, and it snowballed into him saying that he would stay at the condo that night and her telling him to just stay there the rest of the month.
He’d always threatened to stay at the condo, yet he rarely did. Only on nights when he went out for a big dinner or drinks with clients. He’d liked to come home, liked his bed and the steam shower and the way she tucked her feet under his body at night to keep them warm.
He’d liked the smoothies she kept stocked in the fridge and the way that, when he left his clothes on the floor, they were picked up when he returned, and that he didn’t need to know where anything was because he could just ask his wife to get it for him, and she would bitch and complain, but she would do it, even if she was warm and in bed and he was already up and about.
In seventeen years of marriage, she couldn’t think of a single time that he’d gotten something for her. She had never thought to ask him to. That just wasn’t the way their relationship worked, and maybe that was why it had broken.