My Husband Faked My Funeral. I Came Back For Everything. Chapter 08

My Husband Faked My Funeral. I Came Back For Everything. Chapter 08 – Eleven Letters

“He’s nineteen,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine. “He has a heart condition. He stopped answering my calls in May.”

“He didn’t stop.” Sable unlocked a drawer and put the stack in front of me,

rubber-banded, some of them stained. “He was moved to a facility three hundred miles

away in April, without your signature, on the authority of his legal guardian.”

“I’m his guardian.”

“You were.” He said it gently, which was worse. “The paperwork transferring guardianship to your husband was filed on March the ninth.”

March ninth.

Two days before Callum stopped speaking to me.

I sat down on the edge of the chair and read the first letter, which began Evie I know you’re not ignoring me and ended I’m not sick, they’re just saying I am, please come, and I read the fourth, which said Mara tried to call you and they showed up at her work, and I read the eleventh, dated two days after my funeral, which was four words long.

I know you’re alive.

Here’s what fourteen months of silence does to you. Not the loneliness – you can survive loneliness. It’s the story you tell yourself to explain it. Mine had been simple: I am easy to stop loving. My brother got tired of me. My best friend got tired of me. My husband looked at me across a breakfast table and simply ran out of reasons.

I had believed that for four hundred and twenty-six days.

And it was a lie somebody paid for.

Lwent back to the wing and told my unit everything, and then I put my fist through the drywall of my own quarters, and Marisol caught my wrist before I did it twice.

“Commander,” she said. “We’re going to burn them all down. But you have to eat first.”

Two hours later we were briefed on Delacroix.

“We do it differently,” I said. “We don’t meet the lawyers. We ask both families to

–

meet us on the property. Not on either estate on the land itself. Then I give them a solution, and if they refuse it, Sable imposes one, and nobody wants that.”

“And if they refuse Sable?” June asked.

“Then they find out what this House is actually for.”

We packed for four days. On our way out, I watched Marisol slide a playing card into

the seam of our stairwell door before she locked it.

“What’s that?”

“Some of us think someone’s been in our wing,” she said. “Doors closed that we left

open. A drawer wrong.”

“If the card’s still there when we get back, we were paranoid,” June added. “If it’s on

the floor-”

“Then someone came in,” I finished. “Good. Next time you tell me the same day.”

We took two SUVS out at noon. We stopped at a diner an hour from Delacroix land, and while we ate I told them about the first time I answered my grandmother’s phone at four years old – Hart residence, this is Evie, she’s in the bath – and Priya laughed

until she had to put her head on the table.

For one hour I was almost happy.

Then my burner buzzed on the counter, and my whole body went cold before I even Turned it over.

Evie. Don’t delete this It’s Theo.

They know where you are. They ve known for six days.

We’re not the only ones who found you.

Whatever you do, do NOT go onto the Delacroix property tomorrow.

And under it, a photograph. A grainy long-lens shot of me, two nights ago, taking the trash out behind the east annex at Sable House.

Taken from inside the wall.