The call came on a Tuesday morning while I was drinking coffee on my back deck, watching the Seattle skyline emerge through the fog over Lake Washington. It was one of those gray Pacific Northwest mornings where the clouds sit low and everything feels half awake.
Robert Hayes didn’t waste time with pleasantries.
“James, I need you in my office today,” he said. “It’s about Will.”
I sat down hard.
My hand tightened around my mug until my knuckles went white.
“Will’s been gone two months, Robert. Exactly two months. Sixty days,” I said.
“What do you mean it’s about Will?”
His voice carried a weight I’d never heard before. “He left instructions. A package I was forbidden to give you until this exact date.”
Twenty minutes later, I was in my Lexus heading down I-405 toward downtown Bellevue, hands gripping the wheel too tightly, traffic flowing around me like I was the only car that didn’t belong.
William Bennett, who mattered to everyone who knew him, had died on a Tuesday too.
Pancreatic cancer, stage four. Six weeks from diagnosis to death. I’d watched my best friend of forty-three years waste away in that hospice bed, his architect’s hands turning skeletal, his brilliant mind slowly drowning in morphine.
We’d met sophomore year at Stanford, two scholarship kids in a sea of trust-fund babies, bonding over cheap beer and expensive dreams.
We’d built Harrison Tech out of a Silicon Valley garage—his designs, my code—and sold it fifteen years later for forty-three million dollars. We’d been best men at each other’s weddings, godfathers to each other’s kids.
His funeral at a cemetery outside Seattle had been standing room only. I’d delivered the eulogy, barely making it through without breaking down.
I’d held his wife Patricia’s hand at the reception while she smiled, thanked people, and quietly fell apart.
Now his lawyer of thirty years was calling about a “package.”
Bellevue’s downtown was bright with September sun as I pulled into the underground garage of Robert’s office building, a glass tower that reflected clouds and the faint outline of the Space Needle across the lake. His office occupied a corner suite high enough that the windows turned the city into a moving map.
His secretary, Martha—gray-haired, sharp-eyed, and efficient in that classic American law-firm way—ushered me in with a sympathetic look.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
TAP → NEXT PAGE → 👇
