“Password:”  The cursor blinked steadily, expectantly, patiently.  Paula stared back at it, wondering what it might be.  She had, she knew, only a few guesses — three or four at most —before she was locked out forever, and Steven would have taken these last secrets to the grave with him.

Blink, blink, blink.  She glared back at its silent taunt.  Reproachful: this was his sacred space, an area carved out of their lives into which he allowed no one. Not Paula, not the children, not his partners or friends.  Friends.  Who were all those people at his funeral?  Paula wondered about them, for she had lately realized that she knew Steven not well at all, though they had been together almost forty years.  She smiled wryly:  How well, in the end, had he known her?  She thought about Cassie: her small, perfect breasts; her toothy smile; the taste of her lips, her scent, the little sounds she made when she was aroused.

Blink, blink, blink.  Paula wondered if this laptop truly held any of Steven’s secrets, or at least the keys to them, the pathways that might lead her deeper into his life.  Was this pursuit a betrayal of his trust?  A violation of their unspoken agreement?  Curiosity more than sufficient to kill the cat, and drown her kittens?  Or was it vindication, the fact of secrecy itself the actual betrayal?   There was so much she didn’t know, that Steven had not wanted her to know.  Was he shielding her, or himself?  Paula knew that it didn’t matter what Steven wanted, or would have wanted.  Steven was dead, and wasn’t coming back.  She would have to decide for herself: what was she doing here, and should she continue?  Was it better to let the matter — whatever the matter was — drop, and bury it forever with her husband?

Blink, blink, blink.  The phone rang: Cassie, reminding her about tonight.  They had bought the tickets so long ago, even before Steven was sick, and she thought Paula might have forgotten.  “No, darling, I haven’t forgotten.  It’s right here in my calendar.  Yes. Yes.  I love you.  More than anything.”  She tried not to sound impatient.  She adored Cassie, and knew that adoration was returned tenfold, but at this moment…. she needed to be undistracted, undisturbed.  For ten more minutes, she needed to be completely alone, undiscovered and unknown.

Blink, blink, blink.  What secrets were behind this simple prompt?  Who cares, she thought.  I do!  Or do I?  Would she want to know?  Some scoresheet, the tally of his mistresses and random infidelities?  The manuscript she had often seen him reworking, never good enough to show her?  Or something darker, more sinister?  She thought of Cassie again, and of the handful of other lovers she had taken over the years out of frustration or rage with Steven’s seeming indifference towards her. Paula remembered the look on his face, more than once, when she had returned from a sweaty and very satisfying assignation.  At the time she hadn’t been able to process it, but it swept over her in a wave of nausea now: Recognition.  Steven knew, just as she had known about him.  Recognition, and at least a dash of contempt. And now Paula wondered if what she was about to uncover wasn’t the secrets Steven carried with him, but her own instead,  How much had he known, and how much had he wanted to hurt her?  And what better way than to confront her with it now?

Blink, blink, blink.  There was at least one password he had used back when they were undergraduates, that he had told her.  She couldn’t recall why, nor could she remember the word.  A name.  Something out of Conrad, she was sure.  She had gone through all of Steven’s papers already, all of his books, looking for some clue. But she had known before she started that it was hopeless. He had never in his life committed a password to paper: to him this was the first rule, and the audits he had conducted over the years simply made him more determined.  The amount of personal information, he used to rail, client confidences and patient records, locked away behind bad passwords taped to the bottom of the keyboard…. Well, it was simply unforgivable.  An unpardonable sin.  Paula did not for a moment imagine he might have committed it himself.  She knew better.  Still, she looked: if not the word itself, some beacon to guide her to it.  But there was none.

Blink, blink, blink.  Paula thought about all the things Steven had said over the years: about passwords, about hiding things in plain sight, about the disconnect between security and transparency in any democratic society.  He had followed the Snowden affair carefully, meticulously, despite his illness and even as his physical weakness overtook him,  His mental faculties had never seemed sharper and with each day’s revelations he seemed less surprised, and to know more about the affair than he let on.  There had been rumors that Snowden hadn’t operated alone, that there was someone who had been in on the caper, Paula wondered if it were possible?  She shook her head and rested her fingers on the home row keys.

Blink, blink, blink.  Hide in plain sight.  Security.  It was there, she knew it was there, just out of reach.  Steven had always had a wonderful sense of humor, and a sense of the absurd.  He disliked simple passwords, prone to dictionary attack.  But his laptop was different.  Wasn’t it?  Security….

Blink, blink, blink.  Paula sat up.  She remembered how Steven had fought with clients who left the doors wide open with their weak passwords.  They felt that nobody would stumble through the door who wasn’t looking for it, and that nobody would bother looking. “Security through obscurity,” he liked to say, “is no security at all.   It would be wonderful to live in a world where strong locks were unnecessary, but I’ve never lived there and neither will you.”  Paula could hear his lecture voice ringing in her ears, and she smiled.

Blink, blink, blink.  “Password:”  Paula typed the word.  Obscurity.  No capitals, the way Steven liked.

Blink, blink, blink.  She was in.  Now what?

Blink, blink, blink.  Paula blinked back, and slowly dragged all of Steven’s folders to the trash.  She didn’t pause before emptying it. She didn’t need to know.

She shut down the laptop for the last time, slipped on her coat and went to meet Cassie for dinner before the show.  She didn’t stop to adjust her hair in the mirror, just walked out of the apartment she had shared with Steven feeling like an entirely new woman, more sure of herself than she ever had been.  She knew her husband, and she knew her own place in the world.  She had things to do, and now nothing was in her way.