My Husband Faked My Funeral. I Came Back For Everything. Chapter 14

My Husband Faked My Funeral. I Came Back For Everything. Chapter 14 – Everything Further

Three months later, on the ninth of October, I turned twenty-six in a room full of lawyers and signed my own name.

Let me back up.

Ambrose Devereux is in federal custody awaiting trial on thirty-one counts, including the 1979 death of Iris Hart, which is legally complicated and morally very simple. Walter Kade took a plea in August. He gets to spend whatever’s left of his life explaining nineteen years to himself.

Callum Ashford cooperated, because he was always going to cooperate. He gave up the clinic, the doctor, the man in the snow with the syringe, and his mother, in that order, which tells you everything about him you’d ever need to know. Vivienne was arrested in her garden. I’m told she asked to change her shoes first.

Nine families. That’s what Devereux said, and he wasn’t lying. We’ve confirmed six.

Sable stood up a permanent task force to find the other three and every woman they’ve buried, and he handed it to one person.

Me.

“You’re twenty-six,” he said, “and I’m about to make you the youngest Commander in the history of this House, and half my partners will lose their minds.”

“Let them, sir. I’ll remember every word they say.”

He laughed until he had to take his glasses off.

My whole unit came with me. Nadia runs my intelligence desk with Ezra attached at the hip; they marry in the spring. Priya has built a database that six very old families are going to hate. Marisol runs my house and my calendar and tells me when I’m being

a monster.

And Roman Voss resigned his post six weeks later, because you cannot be in the same chain of command as a woman you’re courting, and because his father finally

retired.

He asked Sable for a written exemption from Article Nine before he ever asked me to dinner. Showed me the letter over the appetizers.

“You went to your godfather about me before you asked if I wanted to go out with you?”

“I go to him about everything,” he said. “It’s a character flaw.”

Reader, I kissed him in the middle of that restaurant.

Which brings me to the ninth of October.

Eight hundred and forty-one million dollars released at 9:02 that morning. By noon it was gone.

Forty-one names. That’s what it bought. The Hart Line Foundation now funds one thing and one thing only: the identification, exhumation, and prosecution of the estates of women declared dead, incompetent, or simply forgotten, from 1974 forward. Céline Renard’s headstone went in before the first frost, exactly as I promised. She was the first.

Then I did the other thing.

My grandmother left me forty-seven letters. One for every birthday she wouldn’t be alive for, sealed, in a fire safe in Walter Kade’s basement, and he never gave me a single one, because a girl with her grandmother’s warnings in her hands is harder to sell.

The FBI released them to me in September.

Theo read the first four out loud in my kitchen while I cooked and pretended the

steam was why my eyes were running. She’d written the first one when I was

seventeen. It began: Evangeline. If a man ever tells you that you’re being difficult, you should marry the opposite of him.

And there’s one more thing.

The county file on me still said, in the block where a life is summarized by a clerk:

HART-ASHFORD, EVANGELINE. DECEASED 01/06. NO FURTHER ENTRIES.

No further entries.

I had that amended on my birthday. It took an hour and a judge and my brother holding my hand under the table.

When the clerk turned the screen around so I could check it, there was a date, and a correction, and eleven lines of case history, and it started with two words that I’m going to keep for the rest of my life:

Everything further.

Late that night we drove out to the cemetery above Coldwater, because I wanted to see them take the stone out of the ground myself, and because Roman said if I went alone I’d do something stupid like dig..

They lifted it at eleven. Beloved wife, face-down in the grass. Somebody’s going to grind it flat and sell it to somebody else, which I find hilarious.

Theo went to sit in the car. Roman stayed.

“What do you remember?” he asked. He always asks. It’s my favorite thing about him.

I closed my eyes and let it come, because it always comes, because I don’t get to choose.