I Died Divorcing Him. Then I Woke Up Married Again. Chapter 01

I Died Divorcing Him. Then I Woke Up Married Again. Chapter 01

I found out my husband loved me eleven seconds before I died.

I was on the marble floor of our foyer, divorce papers scattered around me like confetti at a funeral, and my heart was doing something wrong. Stuttering. Skipping. My vision narrowed to a tunnel of gold chandelier light.

Roman Vale hit his knees beside me so hard I heard the bone crack.

Six years of marriage. Six years of a man who said good morning like he was reading it off a teleprompter, who slept in a separate wing, who flinched when my fingers brushed his over the coffee pot. Manhattan called him the Glass King. I called him my husband, which was a technicality and a joke.

And now he was screaming.

“Ava. Ava—look at me—” His hands were shaking. Roman Vale’s hands never shook. He’d survived a hostile takeover and his father’s funeral in the same week without blinking. “Don’t you dare. I own three hospitals, do you hear me? I will buy you a new heart. Just stay.”

“Sign,” I rasped. “The papers. You wanted—”

“I never wanted.” His forehead pressed to mine, and his tears hit my cheek, warm, humiliating, unbearable. “Six years, Ava. Six years I loved you from the other side of a hallway because you asked me to. Every night. Every single night I stood outside your door like a coward—”

Asked him to? I never asked him for anything but a scrap of him.

“—the woman in the photos was never mine. The headlines were bought. I found out too late, I found out last week—” His voice cracked into something I’d never heard from him, something young and ruined. “Please. Please don’t leave me alone in this house.”

And then footsteps. Unhurried. Amused.

Julian Vale, my husband’s cousin, crouched down in his steel-gray suit and looked at me the way a man looks at a completed spreadsheet.

“Heart failure,” he said pleasantly, to Roman, who wasn’t listening. “Terribly sad. The thallium’s been in her migraine capsules since March. Slow, cumulative, undetectable unless somebody looks. Nobody ever looks.”

He patted my hair.

“You should have signed sooner, sweetheart. A dead wife’s shares vote so much quieter than a live one’s.”

I tried to say his name. I tried to warn Roman. All that came out was air.

The last thing I saw was my husband’s face, the mask finally, completely gone, and the last thing I heard was him saying I love you, I love you, I’ve always—

Then nothing.

Then vanilla.

I woke up choking on the smell of my own shampoo, sunlight stabbing through the east windows, my pulse slamming so hard my ribs hurt.

I was in my bed. My old bed, in the guest suite, with the blue silk duvet I’d thrown out two years ago after the housekeeper spilled wine on it.

The duvet was spotless.

I sat up so fast the room swam. My phone lit up on the nightstand.

Thursday, March 14.

I stared at it until the numbers blurred. March fourteenth. The morning I’d walked into my lawyer’s office and filed. Thirty days before the anniversary gala. Thirty days before I bled out my life on that foyer floor.

Beside my phone: a small amber bottle. AVA VALE — 1 CAPSULE DAILY FOR MIGRAINE. Half empty.

I picked it up with two fingers like it was a live snake, because it was.

The thallium’s been in her migraine capsules since March.

My hands started shaking. Then my whole body. I made it to the bathroom in time to be sick, and when I came up, gasping, I caught my own reflection—twenty-nine years old, alive, heart thundering, cheeks flushed pink instead of corpse-gray.

Downstairs, the front door opened. Keys hit the silver dish. Measured footsteps crossed the foyer where, thirty days from now, I was scheduled to die.

“Ava.” My husband’s voice. Flat. Polite. The voice of a stranger who paid my credit card bills. “The car’s here. Your lawyer’s office called to confirm eleven o’clock.”

Six years I’d hated that voice for what it wouldn’t say.

Now I knew exactly what was underneath it.

I gripped the sink until my knuckles went white, and I made myself three promises.

Thirty days until the night I die.

This time, I know who kills me.

And this time, I’m not signing a damn thing.