In 1985, my husband made a bet with me: “If you put up with me for forty years, I’ll give you something impossible to imagine.”
Part 1
The doorbell rang at precisely 3:17 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon, exactly six months after I buried my husband of forty years. I was in the small backyard of our suburban Connecticut home, tending to the rose bushes Bart had planted for our twentieth anniversary, trying to convince myself that life in America could somehow continue normally despite the gaping hole his absence had carved into my days.
When I opened the front door, a distinguished gentleman in an expensive charcoal suit stood on my porch, holding a leather briefcase and wearing the serious expression lawyers seem to perfect in law school.
“Mrs. Blackwood?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“My name is Edmund Thornfield, from Thornfield & Associates, New York.” His voice was calm, precise, East Coast polished. “I have some rather extraordinary instructions from your late husband that I was to deliver precisely six months after his passing.”
My heart skipped a beat. Bart had been full of surprises throughout our marriage, but posthumous instructions delivered by an American lawyer was a new development, even for him.
“Instructions, Mr. Thornfield?” I asked. “My husband’s will was read months ago. Everything was quite straightforward. We had a very simple estate here in Connecticut.”
“This matter is separate from the standard probate proceedings,” he replied. “May I come in? What I need to discuss with you is of a rather unusual nature.”
I stepped aside and led him into the living room. As he crossed the hardwood floor, I noticed how he glanced around our modest split‑level home with the calculating eye of someone accustomed to appraising valuable property. Bart and I had lived comfortably, but never lavishly, on our combined academic salaries. He’d worked as a maritime historian, specializing in lost shipwrecks. I’d spent my career as an art historian at a small American university.
We were, as far as anyone knew, an ordinary middle‑class couple in a quiet U.S. suburb.
