My Best Friend Took My Man. I Gave Her the Whole Ceremony Chapter 09

My Best Friend Took My Man. I Gave Her the Whole Ceremony Chapter 09

The pain was so bad she couldn’t let herself think about what it must have been like for me, dying, knowing my best friend and my boyfriend had betrayed me.

Ethan didn’t move. Didn’t speak.

He watched me on the screen, running his hand over the urn in his lap again and again, the way he used to stroke my hair.

But all he was touching now was cold porcelain.

I wasn’t going to look up and smile at him this time. Not ever again.

They brought me home. Ethan wanted to put me in the white rose garden, the way I’d asked.

But the white roses were gone. He’d had them ripped out himself. Champagne roses stood in their place.

Something snapped in him. He dropped to his knees and started tearing the champagne roses out of the ground with his bare hands.

No gloves, no tools. The thorns tore into his palms.

He didn’t flinch. Just kept ripping, blank-faced and mechanical.

When every last rose was gone, the ground was raw and empty.

His hands were slick with blood and dirt, and he didn’t care.

He crouched in the bare soil and broke.

It started low, strangled and held back, and then it ripped loose. He sobbed the way children do, open-mouthed and unguarded, with complete abandon.

I watched him, and I didn’t understand.

I was dead. Why didn’t he just go be with Valerie?

Why fall apart now, when I was no longer there to see it?

If he really loved me, why did he touch her while I was still breathing?

My thoughts were getting hazy. I think I was starting to disappear for good.

They didn’t bury me. They kept my ashes in the estate.

For a while, Ethan tried to function. He went out. He saw people. But he stopped seeing Valerie. Whatever the three of us had been, it was over.

Someone leaked it online. Valerie had been with her best friend’s fiancé. Ethan had cheated on me with the girl I grew up with. It spread through our entire social circle.

Everyone took my side.

“What did Clara ever do to deserve that? None of it was her fault.”

Someone found Valerie’s second account and the caption under that clip.

That’s when Ethan finally understood why I’d changed.

I’d seen it. All of it. Every word.

Ethan knelt in front of my urn, and grief swelled inside him until there was no room for anything else.

When he looked up, his eyes were clear. Terrifyingly clear. “We’re coming, Clara. We’ll be with you soon.”

I had no heartbeat left, but something in me lurched.

When Ethan called Valerie over, I used everything I had to keep her away from that door.

“Don’t go in. Valerie, please, he’s lost it.”

She couldn’t hear me. She walked right through me and set a fresh white rose next to my urn.

Ethan snatched the rose away and crushed it under his heel.

“You don’t get to mourn her.”

Valerie’s lip curled. “And you do?”

“The first time, we were drunk. Fine. But the second time? You wanted it just as much as I did. So drop the grieving fiancé act.”

Valerie’s eyes were burning.

Neither of them said another word.

They sat on the couch in silence for a long time. Then Ethan got up and went to the kitchen. He came back with a glass of water.

“Let’s go tell her we’re sorry.”

Valerie looked at him. “What?”

Ethan slipped a cord around her neck and pulled it tight.

I screamed. I threw myself at them.

But I had no body. My hands passed through them like smoke. “Stop.
Please, don’t do this. Please…”

Ethan pulled tighter. Valerie fought at first.

Then Ethan said one thing, and she stopped.

“Think about how much pain she was in at the end. And she had to carry it knowing the two people she loved most had done that to her.”