She blinked, surprised, maybe even a little hurt. I just want you to know I love you. I looked at her for a long moment. Somewhere behind my ribs, the last honest piece of me, the piece that had married her 11 years ago in a backyard in Fair Oaks with string lights and a rented arch, cracked one final time and went quiet.
I know, I said. I’ve always known exactly how much. She smiled, thinking it was tenderness. It wasn’t tenderness. Not anymore. Benson tracked the paperwork through a contact at the county recorder’s office.
Legally, mind you, nothing that would jeopardize the case. Just watching public filing cues the way you’d watch a pot waiting for it to boil. On the day the private hospice physician submitted the preliminary death certificate paperwork, 3 weeks and 2 days after Pamela’s tip, an ordinary gray morning that felt too plain for what it was about to set in motion, Benson called me.
It’s filed, he said. Preliminary cause of death, pending final signature, complications from pancreatic cancer. Signed by the hospice physician, co-signed by Dr. Holloway. She’s not even in the building anymore.
Is she? Transferred to the private hospice facility near Roseville 2 days ago, which means somewhere in the next 48 hours, that final signature gets submitted. The claim goes to Pacific Sun Mutual.
And your wife Benson paused. Your wife’s supposed to disappear. Not today. She’s not, I said. I called my attorney. I called Jerome. And for the first time in 3 weeks, I stopped pretending to be sad.
The next 48 hours were going to be the most satisfying of my entire life. The night before we drove out to Roseville, I couldn’t sleep, so I sat at the kitchen table going over Benson’s file one more time. The way you’d rehearse lines before a performance you couldn’t afford to flub.
Jerome showed up around midnight, uninvited, carrying a paper bag of takeout neither of us needed.
“Figured you weren’t sleeping,” he said, dropping into the chair across from me.
“You figured, right? You nervous?”
“I don’t know what I am,” I admitted.
“Angry, sad, a little bit excited, which feels like it should embarrass me more than it does.”
“It shouldn’t embarrass you,” Jerome said.
“Unwrapping a burrito like this was any other night. You’ve been carrying three months of somebody else’s lie on your back. Man’s allowed to feel something other than sad when the weight finally comes off.
What if she talks her way out of it? Denise is good at that. Better than good. Then your attorney and Benson and Pamela and every scrap of paper in that folder does the talking for you instead.
Jerome said, “You don’t have to win an argument with her tomorrow, Patrick. You just have to stand there and let the truth land where it’s supposed to land.” I sat with that for a long moment, turning it over.
When did you get so wise? I asked. Around the third time you called me crying at some ungodly hour, Jerome said, not unkindly. A man learns things. We sat there another hour, not talking about the case anymore.
Just eating bad takeout at my kitchen table like it was any ordinary night. Except it wasn’t. And both of us knew it. And neither of us said so out loud.
My attorney moved fast once the paperwork hit. She filed an emergency motion with the county citing suspected fraudulent death certification, attaching Benson’s documentation, Pamela’s sworn statement, and the biopsy discrepancy.
That kind of motion doesn’t usually move quickly, but a licensed attorney flagging active insurance fraud involving a still living patient gets attention in a hurry, especially once she looped in an investigator from the state medical board who apparently had been quietly circling Dr. haul away for an unrelated licensing complaint for over a year.
Small world. Karma’s apparently been keeping its own file on this guy longer than I had. We drove out to the private hospice facility near Roseville. Me, Jerome, my attorney, and an investigator from the county who was handling the fraud complaint.
Pamela met us in the parking lot, hands shaking, looking like she hadn’t slept in a week.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she said.
“You’re doing the right thing,” I told her. And for the first time since this whole nightmare started, I actually meant something kind. We walked into that facility together. Denise was in a private room near the back.
No monitors hooked up to her. I noticed immediately no IV drip, nothing, just her sitting up in the bed reading a magazine like she was waiting for a spa appointment instead of her own funeral paperwork. She looked up when I walked in and for one full second, her face did something I’ll never forget.