She folded the papers. That was it.
I waited for more. There was no more.
“That’s everything?” I said.
“That’s the will,” Vanessa said.
I looked at Deb. Deb looked at her lap. Aunt June was looking at Vanessa with an expression I couldn’t read.
“Can I see it?” I said.
There was a half-second pause — short enough that you could claim it wasn’t a pause at all — and then Vanessa said, “Of course,” and handed it across the coffee table.
I looked at the pages. I counted them.
The second page ended mid-sentence. The third page began mid-paragraph. The page numbers at the bottom — she’d read from a version that had page numbers — jumped from 2 to 4.
Page 3 was missing.
## What Page 3 Was
I didn’t say anything immediately. I sat there holding the document and reading it again, more carefully this time, and felt something go very still and very cold in the middle of my chest.
It wasn’t grief. I was full of grief, had been full of it for four days, knew what that felt like. This was different. This was the specific sensation of understanding that something deliberate has been done to you by someone who is sitting across from you in the room.
I asked Vanessa, trying to keep my voice level, if the document was complete.
“That’s everything I have,” she said.
“The page numbers jump from two to four,” I said.
She looked at the papers with an expression that might have been surprise, if you were inclined to believe it was surprise. “It might just be a formatting thing,” she said. “Some word processing programs skip page numbers for title pages or something.”