My brother died a year ago yesterday. Way too early. I guess that’s the place to start talking about this.

I didn’t really know him, though, not as adults. He was ten years my senior, and when he went away to college he stayed in the city where he studied, so through my teenage years I saw him fleetingly a couple of times a year. We grew apart a little there, and we didn’t have much in common beside the home we grew up in. Different hobbies, different degrees, even different sports teams.

Nobody was happier than Marcus that I wanted to follow in Dad’s footsteps on the farm. It took away any guilt he might have felt that he didn’t; he kept right on working at the startup he’d joined while still a student.

Over the next decade or so, Marcus moved from one startup to another, accepting buyouts when the successful ones got sold, accepting the end of the ride gracefully when they fell apart. Working the kind of schedules those hungry young tech companies demand, his Thanksgiving visits became a thing of the past, and we got even further out of the habit.

I think I saw him twice in the 2010s, if that, even though he’d given up on startup life in favour of a job that rarely asked more than forty hours a week.

He’d made a decent amount of money on the buyouts, but his actual income in the startup decade had varied enough that he’d never spent that much. Then he’d settled in and built a life he enjoyed, but by then it was just expected that he didn’t come home to visit. We kept up, as much as we did, by email.

And a year ago yesterday I got a phone call from Miriam, who I’d picked up from the emails was his wife, telling me that he’d passed on in the night, and that she needed me to fly out there.

“Needed” sounded strange even at the time, but that’s not something you think when you’ve just heard news like that. She actually offered to pay for my flight, and it wasn’t until I was on the plane that I wondered what “needed” even meant.

I think at the time I just assumed she felt overwhelmed and wanted someone else who knew him, or else that I’d been named executor on the will (although I hoped that wasn’t the case. That much I definitely didn’t have time for.)

I’ll say this, too; it was nice to fly first class. Miriam had only been willing to buy one ticket, so Pat didn’t fly out with me; honestly that wasn’t so bad, as she knew the farm as well as me or Mom did but unlike Mom, Pat wasn’t pushing seventy. I knew she could be the sane, steady hand a working farm needs every day of the year.

Miriam met me at the airport and drove me out to my brother’s house - this crazy ultra-modern thing he must have bought brand new, all glass and walls without ceilings, ceilings without walls, the kind of thing you see as the backdrop in swanky TV dramas but barely furnished and completely undecorated - and together we sat and talked and tried to figure out our first steps.

The one thing we had clear was that we needed to know what Marcus’ wishes were, and that meant a will, if he had one. Miriam was sure he did, said he mentioned it every so often, updated it when he did something big financially.

I wondered what ‘something big financially’ meant, in a house like this on the fringes of the giant money pot that the tech industry seems to be. It didn’t seem to fit in the world I lived in at all.

Either way, we spent a lot of that evening trying to find it. If it was anywhere in the house, it was digital and behind a password, and it turned out Miriam didn’t know his passwords at all.

In fact she seemed to know almost nothing about his life aside from what he liked to eat, wear, and where he liked to go on dates. The more we talked, the more confusing the picture was. Sure, she was attractive - probably gorgeous, when she wasn’t dealing with grief - but looks alone don’t make a relationship that lasts for years.

I started to worry that actually their relationship hadn’t been that strong at all, and maybe the tickets had been her spending his money to butter me up and persuade me to let her keep the rest of it. It’s hard to explain, but the basic issue was just that she only seemed to know him in the most superficial way.

She knew exactly how he liked his coffee and what shows he didn’t like to be disturbed for, but she couldn’t tell me what movies he’d liked or when they’d last just sat around and talked about the future.

I told myself that grief does weird things to the brain (because it does, after all), and that in her case it was just messing with her memory - or with the parts of it that surface for conversation, anyway. We drank to Marcus’ memory and went to bed.

*

The next morning I went to visit his lawyer. Miriam cried off coming with me, which was definitely weird but, again, I figured grief does weird things to people and I didn’t want to get in the way.

His lawyer wasn’t what I expected. She was young - younger than me, let alone Marcus; it was the first time I’d really had to think about the idea that I was old enough that you could get lawyers running their own firms who were still younger than me.

She’d got her start working with some of those tech firms, when she was very young; now she had a practice of her own and, to hear her tell it, she also had some much more serious clients, one of whom was Marcus.

She also had some damn fine coffee on hand, but that’s probably not an important part of the story, even if I feel like it should be.

I had a better talk with Celandine about Marcus than I’d managed with Miriam, and she was only supposed to be his lawyer. True, she’d known him fifteen years or so, but it just seemed… well, wrong… that she knew Marcus better.

I felt his absence more deeply; felt the sense of loss that had numbed me since that first call more strongly. Over the last few years this woman had come to know my brother better than I did, at least the man he’d become. As much as I’d lost my chance to know him, I felt like I had more of a sense of him.

It was the first time I’d laughed since Miriam had called.

In due time, of course, small talk petered out, as it always will in the end. We sat for a few moments in quiet. I was, I suppose, unsure how to suggest we get down to it.

Celandine cleared her throat awkwardly and pulled open a drawer of her desk. From it she produced a small moleskine notebook, which she put down on the desk.

“I think this should be in your hands,” she said briskly. “So much of Marcus’ affairs are going to end up working their way through probate, but if they’re to be worth anything on the other end, someone needs to take stock and make some judgements.”

This horrified me. I knew nothing about the kind of tech my brother had been involved with. I didn’t see any way my knowledge would help me make the right call. But I picked up the notebook anyway. “And this is…?”

“Your brother’s given me an updated notebook every two months for the past five years,” she said. “Since the month he wrote his will, in fact. Which he did earlier than most around here, but…” She shrugged, and left unsaid that events had proved how right his decision had been.

Bless her for that; I didn’t know how I would have taken hearing it said aloud.

“So what is it?”

“His passwords,” she said, and shrugged again. I looked at her, and did not say that even I, who knew very little about computers, knew there were software services to make it easy to keep all your login details safe.

She knew I was thinking it, though; knew I had to be. Her answer was a moment of visible frustration across a tremendously expressive face. “I don’t know,” she said. “If you find out, I’d love to hear the explanation. But if you’re going to help look after what was his, you’re going to need that book.” She cleared her throat. “And… while we can do the will reading now, I think it will make a lot more sense if you look through what that book opens up first.”

I looked down at it again. “Any words of advice?”

“I think… Honestly, I never entirely understood your brother’s work. I know some of why it was valuable. But I think you’re better off forming your own judgements.”

I nodded slowly. “Well, thank you for your time,” I said. “I’ll try not to need too many consultations.” And I went back to my brother’s home, carrying the book.

*

If I’d worried that writing his passwords down in one place was bad security, I soon found out I’d missed a key point, which was that they made absolutely no sense.

Sitting at Marcus’ kitchen table, in front of his laptop, with Miriam pottering around in the background, uncertain and unsure, I took the little notebook out of my pocket and started trying to log in.

None of the passwords made clear what they were attached to. The first page all had a single word, then a block of letters, numbers and punctuation of varying lengths. The individual words kicking off each entry just didn’t make a whole lot of sense - or I thought they didn’t.

On the other hand, I didn’t think Marcus was just going to repeatedly buy new notebooks to play a long con prank on his lawyer. And that meant the passwords were meant to be used.

And in spite of that I couldn’t even get into his laptop easily. It took ten minutes before I plugged in the string of letters that followed the word “Lieutenant” and the login screen gave way to a Windows install I could actually recognise.

It was another five minutes before I had even a guess at why lieutenant apparently equalled laptop.

“LT,” I said aloud. “LT. Could that be it?”

“Sorry, are you talking to me?” Miriam asked. I’d honestly forgotten she was in the room; I think she was only really there because it was easier to be around another person, one who hopefully understood.

She drifted closer to where I sat as I looked up at her over my shoulder. “I wasn’t, exactly,” I said, “but maybe you can check my reasoning.” I found my eyes straying back to the laptop screen, which seemed to, not flicker, but shimmer, and I was wondering how it did that.

“So the password for the laptop turned out to be the one listed as lieutenant,” I said. “And I’m trying to work out why because maybe working out why will give me a better chance of figuring the others out.”

She nodded. Her eyes were on the book; I couldn’t read her expression, but the way she was looking at it I definitely had a bunch of questions I hadn’t started my day out with. “I think it’s his way of remembering stuff,” I said. “So lieutenant gets shortened to LT in a bunch of movies. And LT can be LapTop. Does that check out for you?”

She nodded. Didn’t say anything but she nodded. Given the way she was looking at the book I thought she probably knew enough to say something, but by this stage all of her behaviour was just so fishy I didn’t know whether pushing was a good idea.

If it wasn’t that there was a photo of her with Marcus on the dresser I’d have been wondering if she was trying to scam me about even knowing him.

“Is the whole book like that?” she asked, and her tone told me she had a good guess about the answer. I debated calling her on it again. The problem was, it was a good question, and one I hadn’t asked.

I turned the page, and saw a completely different scheme for passwords.

This one didn’t even have numbers or punctuation. It was all just strings of words. I couldn’t tell where the bit that should tell me what it was for ended and the bit which was the actual password began. On top of that, there were spaces.

This couldn’t be the same as the first page, that much I was sure of. So the question was, what the fuck was any of that for?

“No,” was all I said to Miriam. “Another puzzle for another day.”

She hung around for a few more moments and I was sure she wanted to say something, but she didn’t. I spent a few more minutes trying to open various different things I thought would be passworded, and then I went back upstairs and called my wife.

*

I was back downstairs in the evening, though. Miriam had admitted she didn’t feel like cooking, and I didn’t feel like cooking, so we agreed that in advance of Marcus’ will we could advance ourselves enough for some fancy takeout.

We did this on his laptop, because it was just easier; I was going to create my own account, but I decided to try to log into his first. ‘Kangaroo’ turned out to be the code for his Deliveroo account; it was good to mark another password down as solved, but that was probably the least useful login to have.

In the end we settled on pizza, and we deliberately ordered too much, with too many sides. I was figuring on leftovers - I’ve always loved pizza for breakfast - but I’d noticed that Miriam seemed happier when I was going big on things. I figured that was because it felt more like the way Marcus acted.

She still seemed… not quite all there, but maybe it was just that I’d grounded myself a little when I called home; I wasn’t mad about it anymore.

Once the order was placed I picked the book back up and I turned it to the second page again. “Okay,” I said. “The first page of this, I know what I’m doing. There’s still, I guess, a bit of a nightmare to come in matching the ones we haven’t found to what they log into. But I know the rules of that puzzle now.”

Miriam nodded. She was sitting up expectantly now; I felt like I had her full attention, and realised I never had done to that point. Something had changed.

“I have no idea what’s going on with this page,” I admitted. “None at all.”

“Maybe I can help,” she said. “Give me an example?”

As weirdly as she’d been acting, I had to wonder if she had some ulterior motive. It was, I admitted to myself, technically possible that she’d been waiting for this, somehow sure it would help steal some of Marcus’ money or property. But even with her odd behaviour, I just couldn’t believe that.

She and Marcus had been together for years. She’d been the one to call me. To pay for me to get out here. She just wanted support, I told myself firmly, even if she had a strange way of showing it.

So I looked at the first entry on the list and I read it out loud. “Me, me, it’s all about me.”

She’d muttered something while my eyes were still on the page; I was looking back up toward her only once it was already happening. I saw only a little, only a flash, of change; saw the moment where her face settled into a different expression.

Expression is probably an understatement. This changed the way her face looked so much it was like a different person inside her skin. A warmer, friendlier person. A happier person.

My brain, slow to catch up sometimes, hurriedly reported that the thing she’d muttered had been “Oh, thank God.” But as it did, this smiling, happier Miriam was sliding forward off her chair.

There was an audible thump as she landed on her knees; she didn’t flinch at it, actually seemed pretty happy about it. She was crawling toward me, hands and knees, and I was watching her and wondering what was going on. But it didn’t occur to me that she was doing anything I ought to interrupt.

Not until she rose up again on her knees, right in front of me, and planted her elbows on my thighs and started unbuckling my belt.

I thought briefly of Pat, and the vows we’d spoken, and how much I loved her; all the same, though, I let Miriam do exactly what she wanted. She had my cock out in no time, and she was kissing its tip as it hardened.

“Mimi knows you’re right, Master,” she said, and I felt my spine tingle, the hairs on the back of my neck rising. “It’s all about you.” And then she was holding a condom packet in her other hand, producing it with the kind of flourish a magician enjoys when the missing card re-appears, and she tore the packet open with her teeth.

She did something with her tongue, I wasn’t sure what, and then her head bobbed forward and down and her mouth engulfed me for just long enough to make me want so much more, and when she lifted her lips from my cock the condom was in place. I felt myself twitch harder at the realisation.

Miriam - Mimi? - was already standing up. Taking hold of her leggings on either side of the crotch, she gave a quick, sharp yank and I saw them rip open.

I should have protested. Should have told her to stop. I know, now, that she would have stopped immediately, however reluctantly, if given a direct order; at the time I remember thinking to myself that I was in a dangerous position if I chose to go against her.

I didn’t actually believe that. It was just a thing I could tell myself to avoid feeling guilty.

She stepped forward to straddle me, adjusting the tear so she could sink down onto my ready cock, and her eyes were bright and laughing and loving, as if the grief were gone, and then I was filling her and she was laughing, riding my cock and teasing and kissing with an experience I might have believed but a zealous enjoyment that I just couldn’t match up with the grey woman I’d met.

I put my hands to her waist and she lifted her arms, caught hold of the loose, shapeless tee she’d been wearing, and pulled it up and over her head without her thighs and her hips and her pussy breaking their rhythm for even a moment. Her hands guided mine to her breasts.

“It’s all about you,” she said again, and her voice was the only thing that didn’t shudder with passion; instead it was a dispassionate near-monotone that somehow held even more zeal, even more need.

My brother had a password to his lover and it seemed like it completely changed who she was.

She rode me there, finding a need of my own to mesh with hers, and for a time I forgot about Pat completely, forgot about home, and lost myself in the moment. I buried my face into her neck as I came, one hand on her other shoulder, pinning her against me, feeling an urgency Pat and I rarely had these days, enjoying a passion equal to my love for my wife.

At the end of which she lifted herself from me and knelt to lick me clean before going off to clean herself. I just sat there, exactly where she’d left me, and I tried to process what had happened.

When the doorbell rang, I was still thinking, and I didn’t react in time to tell her not to answer the door herself. I think we could probably have skipped giving the delivery guy a tip.

*

“God, I’m so glad you finally said that,” she said when she came back in, arms laden down with food. I stood up and helped her unload onto the table.

“You going to explain any of this?”

“If you want me to, I can,” she told me, “but I only know bits and pieces. I’d ruin it.” She cleared her throat. “He always said if he left early he wanted you to take over. I know he made sure Celandine was ready to brief you.”

I just looked at her a while, turning it all over in my head. I must have had some glimpse of the way Marcus would have gone about things, even if I didn’t have a clue what the method was.

I said “Make an appointment. As soon as possible.”

I saw her eyelids flutter, her smiling lips part for a moment. “Yes, Master,” she said, and she turned and walked across to where she’d left her phone.

I sat, and I waited, and I thought, I’m sitting in my brother’s house with my cock out, after his lover rode me hard and called me Master. I tried to decide how I felt about it.

“She’ll see you this evening, Master, if you can get there in the next two hours,” she reported. “She hasn’t left the office yet.”

It was late enough that the idea of still working horrified me. “Tell her I’ll be at least an hour.”

“Yes, Master.”

She came back to the table and joined me for a meal once that was done. We ate in silence, but the silence was different now - or I was - and I actually quite enjoyed it, and so did she, I think.

*

“So, this was urgent?” Celandine asked.

“Yeah. I’d like you to read me the will, please.”

She opened her mouth to say something, paused, and I could see her thinking better of it. “Let me pull the most recent copy,” she said. “And can I offer you a drink?”

“What do you have?”

“We can lay our hands on most things. I recommend something strong. There may be some surprises.”

So there I was, sat down with my brother’s password book in my pocket and a glass of gin in one hand, as Celandine settled herself at her desk and began to read.

“I, Marcus Templeton, a resident of the State of California, make, publish, and declare this to be my Last Will and Testament, revoking all wills and codicils at any time heretofore made by me.

“First, I declare that the expenses of any last illness and my funeral, the expenses of the administration of my estate, and all estate, inheritance, and similar taxes payable with respect to property included in my estate, whether or not passing under this will, and any interest or penalties thereon, shall be paid out of my residuary estate, without appointment and with no right to reimbursement from any recipient of any such property.”

She paused. “Which, you can probably already guess, means any costs associated with Marcus dying and sorting out the will are to be paid from Marcus’ estate. Right?”

I nodded, and she continued.

“Second, it is my desire that, upon my legal death, I be frozen cryogenically unless the judgement of my personal physician is that damage suffered in and after death is such that my quality of life on resurrection would be unacceptable.” She paused and glanced up at my face on that one. I couldn’t blame her; I kind of wanted to see what my reaction looked like as well.

California is a hell of a drug.

“Third, I give all real estate owned by me at the time of my death, and all rights that I have under any related insurance policies, to my brother, Richard Templeton.” It took me a moment to recognise myself in that; aside from Mark deciding he’d rather be Marcus my family have always shortened names, and I was much more comfortable as Ricky.

“I also give all property that identifies itself as my property to my brother, Richard Templeton.” She was watching me again, and I think she saw some understanding in my face, and she smiled slightly. “Good,” she said. “I didn’t want to have to explain that.

“Fourth, I give my company Positive Outlook to my brother, Richard Templeton. I recommend that he allow my PA, Delilah Whitlock, to run the company until he is sure he knows better than her, which I think may be some time.”

I held up my hand there. “Hold up. His recommendation to run his company is his PA?”

“Marcus doesn’t really believe in detailed hierarchy,” she said, and it was obvious she was choosing her words carefully. “There’s him at the top and then there’s whatever arrangement gets things done most effectively.”

That was fair enough. I nodded.

“May I continue?”

“Sure.”

“Fifth, I direct that my interests in other businesses, stocks, shares, and options alike, be liquidated on a schedule recommended by my broker, and that this money be placed into a new Trust fund, for the maintenance, upkeep, and well-being of my property and the expansion of its portfolio. My brother, Richard Templeton, is to serve as Director of this trust with a Board including my partner Miriam Smith, my friend Celandine Boudreaux, and my business partner Delilah Whitlock. If my brother chooses not to serve as Director of this trust, then he relinquishes his claim on all property that identifies itself as my property.”

I nodded again. “I figured it’d be something like that,” I said.

“Sixth,” she continued, “I give all the rest, residue, and remainder of my property and estate, both real and personal, of whatever kind and wherever located, that I own or to which I shall be in any manner entitled at the time of my death - all of my residuary estate - to:

“(a) if, as I expect, he survives me, to my brother, Richard Templeton,

“(b) if he does not survive me, then to any child I may have to be held in trust until they are of age,

“(c) if he does not survive me and there shall be no issue of mine then living, to any issue of my brother, Richard Templeton, to be held in trust until they are of age,

“(d) if none of the beneficiaries described above shall survive me, then I give my residuary estate to those who would take from me as if I were then to die without a will, unmarried and the absolute owner of my residuary estate, and a resident of the State of California, and I wish them great luck in understanding the true extent of this estate.

“In witness whereof, I, Marcus Templeton, et cetera, et cetera… Well, that portion doesn’t need discussing here.” She flashed a warm smile and picked up the gin bottle in unspoken invitation. Truthfully, I hadn’t realised to that point that I’d drained the glass.

“I’m sure you have some questions,” she told me.

“Yes,” I said slowly, “but I don’t want to start with a question.”

I could see her composing herself for what I think she assumed would be a dumb question, her expression settling into a professional mask.

I pulled the notebook out of my pocket and the mask fell away, as much as she was clearly trying to keep it on. There was a look of excitement in its place. I was reminded of Miriam suddenly giving me her full attention, and I realised what had been in that expression that I hadn’t been able to place.

Hope.

“See sea shells on the sea shore,” I said, and was rewarded by the low moan of delight that issued from the other side of the expensive oak desk.

“Thank you for seeing Cece’s true self, Master,” she answered.