At eighty my stomach grew so large my family got frightened. The scan found something — and then a twelve-year-old record with my late husband’s name on it, and a folder called PROJECT AGNES.

PART 1

“Mrs. Vanterpool. Have you ever been seen through a private research facility?”

A consultant asked me that across a desk at Ardenne General, with a folder open in front of her, on the worst afternoon I have had since 2014.

My name is Agnes Vanterpool. Everybody has called me Aggie since about 1952.

I am eighty years old. Three children, seven grandchildren, four great-grandchildren, and a house on Fennimore Street that I have been in since 1971.

I thought there was very little left that was going to take me by surprise.

My husband Rutger died in the November of 2014. He was seventy-six. We had been married fifty years and two months.

After he went I stayed in that house, because everybody told me to sell it and I am contrary.

And for eleven years I had a perfectly good life. My daughter-in-law Soraya rings on Wednesdays. Dov comes on Sundays. The woman next door takes my bins out.