Every Sunday a widower sets up a flea market stall with one of his late wife's belongings and prices it so absurdly high that nobody will ever buy it. $400 for a chipped teacup, $1,100 for a hairbrush. He isn't selling anything. He wants an excuse to tell strangers about her when they ask why it costs so much.
She was his wife's hospice nurse. She has an envelope in his wife's handwriting: "He'll price everything so nobody can buy it. Pay whatever he asks, and tell him the parts he left out." The cash is the grocery money that went missing a little at a time over their thirty-one-year marriage. He always half-suspected it and never asked. Every week he has been paid with his own savings for his own memories, and his wife made sure she got the last word in the argument.
💡 The story runs on a flea market's basic deal, haggling over what a thing is worth, and turns it into a fight over who gets to tell the true story of a marriage, with a dead woman setting the final price.