Dead Wife Walking Chapter 01

Dead Wife Walking Chapter 01

The heart monitor flatlined. The doctors stepped back. And Ethan Blackwell, my husband of three years, wasn’t even in the building.

He was twenty miles away, holding another woman’s hand at a jewelry store, picking out the emerald necklace I’d begged him for on our anniversary — for her.

I know this because I was floating above my own corpse, watching the nurse pull the white sheet over my face, while my phone screen still glowed with his last text:

*”Stop being dramatic, Vivian. It’s just a cold. Take some medicine and stop calling me. I’m in a meeting.”*

A cold.

I had leukemia.

He never knew because he never cared enough to ask why I’d grown so thin, why I slept eighteen hours a day, why the bathroom trash was full of bloodied tissues.

To him, I was the contract wife — the placeholder his grandmother had chosen — a nobody from a small town who should’ve been grateful just to breathe the same air as the great Ethan Blackwell.

And maybe I was grateful, once. When he married me, I thought I could earn his love. I kept the house. I cooked his meals. I waited up past midnight for him, every single night, like a dog waiting at the door.

He never came home before 2 a.m. And when he did, it was with the scent of Serena’s perfume on his collar.

Serena Lane — his first love, his “soulmate,” the woman he told me about on our wedding night.

“This marriage means nothing,” he had said, loosening his tie without looking at me. “Grandmother forced this. You’ll have your own room. Don’t touch my things. Don’t embarrass me in public. And don’t ever think I’ll love you.”

I had nodded, swallowing the lump in my throat. I was twenty-two. Orphaned at nineteen. His grandmother had saved me from the streets.

I told myself I could survive without love.

I was wrong.

Three years of silence. Three years of eating dinner alone. Three years of watching him laugh with Serena at company events while introducing me as “just a family arrangement.”

And now I was dead.

The nurse called him seven times. He declined every single one.

It was his assistant, Mark, who finally showed up at the hospital. I watched him freeze in the doorway, his face draining of color as the doctor explained.

“Mrs. Blackwell passed at 3:47 p.m. Acute myeloid leukemia. Stage four. She was diagnosed eighteen months ago.”

Mark’s hands trembled. “Eighteen months? That’s… does Mr. Blackwell know?”

The doctor’s expression was grim. “We called her emergency contact repeatedly. He never answered. She listed him as her only family.”

Mark collapsed into a chair, his head in his hands. “Oh God. Oh God, she never told anyone.”

I crouched beside him, oddly touched. Of everyone in Ethan’s world, his assistant was the only one who ever treated me like a human being.

‘Don’t cry for me, Mark. I’m not worth it,’ I thought. ‘But please — when you tell him — don’t let him pretend to be sad.’

Mark pulled out his phone with shaking hands and dialed.

Three rings. Then that cold, familiar voice.

“What is it? I told you not to call unless it’s urgent.”

Mark’s voice cracked. “Sir… your wife is dead.”

Silence.

Then: “Which wife?”