The next morning I called that lawyers office myself, gave them Geralds name, and asked what my husband had been doing there in March, and when the lawyer explained, gently, once I confirmed who I was, I had to sit down at the kitchen table and weep, because it was nothing I feared.
Gerald had not been hiding anything shameful from me at all.
The private calls with our daughter, the hushed conversations, the receipt from a lawyers office, were all part of a surprise Gerald and our daughter had been planning together, for me, for our fortieth anniversary.
The lawyer, once I insisted, and once she checked with the note Gerald had left, told me. My husband had been to that lawyer to set up a trust, and to finalize the paperwork on something he and our daughter had been secretly arranging: they were buying back the little lake cottage where Gerald and I honeymooned forty years ago, the place we always dreamed of retiring to and never could afford.
Our daughter had been in on it, helping him with the arrangements, the phone calls I was not part of, the conversations that stopped when I walked in. Not because they were shutting me out, but because they were planning the surprise of my life.
Geralds moods that spring, the ones I read as something being wrong, were just an easygoing man struggling to keep the biggest secret of his life. He was not distant. He was excited, and terrified I would find out before the reveal.
When I confronted Gerald that evening, gently, with what I had learned, his face fell, and then he laughed, and then he cried, because his surprise was spoiled, but the love behind it was not.
He told me everything. He had spent two years and every spare dollar, with our daughters help, buying back our honeymoon cottage, and he was going to give me the key on our fortieth anniversary, that very summer.
I wept in his arms. All spring I had feared the worst, and my husband had been secretly giving me the dream of our whole marriage.
We drove out to the cottage together that weekend, no more secrets. It was just as I remembered, on the water, quiet and beautiful, where we spent the first days of our life together.
We retired there. We live now in the little cottage where our marriage began, forty-some years later, exactly as we always dreamed. Our daughter visits with the grandchildren.
My daughter kept telling me Dad was just tired. He was not tired. He was building me the surprise of a lifetime, and she was helping him. I feared they were shutting me out. They were pulling me in, toward the happiest chapter of our lives. I have never been so glad to be so wrong.