Dead Wife Walking Chapter 03

Dead Wife Walking Chapter 03

Ethan didn’t read the letter that night. Or the next night.

He tossed the velvet box onto his desk, buried beneath merger documents and Serena’s shopping receipts, and forgot about it — the same way he’d forgotten about me for three years.

My funeral was held four days later. “Simple,” as he’d instructed. A small chapel. White lilies — generic, impersonal. He didn’t even know my favorite flowers were sunflowers.

I’d told him once, early in our marriage, when I was still foolish enough to believe small details might bridge the distance between us. He’d responded without looking up from his phone: “Sunflowers are tacky.”

So, white lilies it was. Even in death, I was arranged to suit his taste.

The attendance surprised me. My colleagues from the small publishing house where I’d worked part-time — a job Ethan didn’t know I had. My neighbor, Mrs. Chen, who used to hear me crying through the walls and would leave soup at my door without a word. Mark, standing in the back row, his eyes swollen.

And then — a face I hadn’t expected.

Eleanor Blackwell. Ethan’s grandmother. The woman who had orchestrated our marriage.

She arrived in a wheelchair, pushed by her personal nurse. At ninety-one, she was frail but fierce — the kind of woman whose silence commanded more authority than most people’s shouting.

When she saw the sparse arrangement, the cheap casket, the empty front row where a grieving husband should have been, her expression didn’t change.

But her hand, resting on the arm of the wheelchair, trembled.

“Where,” she said quietly, “is my grandson?”

Mark stepped forward. “He said he’d be late, ma’am. He had a board meeting.”

“A board meeting.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Eleanor closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were steel. “Push me to the front.”

The nurse wheeled her to my casket. Eleanor reached out with a papery, veined hand and touched the glass panel above my face.

“You foolish girl,” she murmured. “Why didn’t you come to me?”

I knelt beside her wheelchair and pressed my forehead to her knee, even though she couldn’t feel it. She was the only person in that family who had shown me warmth. She called me “dear” and snuck me chocolates when Ethan wasn’t looking.

I hadn’t told her about the leukemia because I knew she would have fought for me, and fighting Ethan would have worsened her own fragile health.

So I protected her, just as I had protected him — from myself.

Ethan arrived twenty minutes before the service ended. He wore a black suit, perfectly pressed. His face showed nothing.

Serena wasn’t with him — even he wasn’t that shameless.

He sat in the front row without greeting anyone. He didn’t approach the casket.

Eleanor watched him from across the aisle. Then she said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “You couldn’t even give her one hour.”

He stiffened. “Grandmother, this isn’t the place.”

“This is exactly the place. This girl spent three years in your house, and you treated her like furniture. She’s dead, Ethan. The least you can do is look at her.”

The chapel went silent. Every eye turned to him.

Slowly, mechanically, he stood and walked to the casket.

I watched him look down at my face. The mortician had done a decent job, but nothing could fully hide how thin I’d become. My cheekbones jutted sharply. My collarbones were visible above the neckline of the dress someone had chosen for me — not one I owned. My own clothes had grown too large months ago.

His brow furrowed. A crack in the armor. “She’s… thin.”

“She weighed eighty-nine pounds when she died,” Mark said from behind him. “The doctor said she’d been refusing treatment for the last three months. She couldn’t afford it.”

Ethan turned sharply. “What do you mean, she couldn’t afford it? She had access to the household account.”

Mark’s laugh was hollow. “The household account you capped at two thousand a month? The one that also had to cover groceries, utilities, and the dry cleaning bills for your suits? That account?”

A murmur rippled through the chapel.

Ethan’s jaw clenched. “She never asked for more.”

“No,” Mark said quietly. “She never did.”

Eleanor gripped the arms of her wheelchair. “Take me home. I can’t stand to look at him.”

As the nurse turned the wheelchair, Eleanor paused and looked at Ethan one last time.

“Your grandfather built this family with his bare hands. He would be ashamed of you.”

She left.

Ethan stood alone at my casket, the chapel emptying around him.

I leaned close to his ear and whispered words he couldn’t hear: ‘Read the letter, Ethan. Then you’ll know exactly what you destroyed.’

That night, he finally opened the velvet box.