A Stranger Handed Me a Blue Box at Church and Said, “You’ll Need This Tonight”—I Wish I’d Opened It Sooner

The stranger appeared beside me during the fellowship hour at St. Catherine’s, pressing a small blue box into my hands before I could react. “You’ll need this tonight, Mr.

Grant,” she whispered, her voice urgent and low. “Midnight. Don’t miss it.” Then she vanished into the Sunday crowd like smoke through redwoods, leaving me standing there with my daughter Amber and her husband Rowan, holding something that would shatter what remained of my carefully reconstructed life.

My name is Simon Grant, I’m sixty-seven years old, and exactly one year ago I buried my wife of forty years after a car accident on Highway 101. What I didn’t know that Sunday morning was that I’d buried a lie, and the woman who’d just handed me that blue box was about to prove it. I drove home to my property in the Humboldt County redwoods with the box hidden under my truck seat, telling myself it was probably nothing—maybe someone returning something of Blair’s they’d found, maybe a sympathy gift I was supposed to acknowledge.

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