My Wife Buried Me Alive to Steal My Fortune With the Man I Trusted

“What?”

“Touch him.”

“He's my husband.”

“Was.”

The silence afterward felt different.

Olivia's voice hardened.

“Careful.”

“I mean medically.”

“No, you didn't.”

“Olivia.”

“You don't get to become disgusted with me now.”

“I didn't say I was disgusted.”

“You have that voice.”

“What voice?”

“The one you use when you want to pretend you're better than the thing you're doing.”

Mason did not answer.

That frightened me more than if he had.

Their alliance had cracks.

I needed one of those cracks to widen before six.

A door opened abruptly.

“Mrs. Cole?”

Olivia stepped away so fast her heel struck something metallic.

A woman apologized from the doorway and explained that several family members had arrived early.

Olivia's grieving voice returned almost instantly.

“Thank you, Marissa.”

The performance was seamless.

Mason murmured that he would go around back.

“No,” Olivia said.

One word, too fast.

Marissa apparently noticed.

There was a short, uncomfortable pause.

Then Olivia added, “I mean, you don't have to leave just because my family is here.”

Mason recovered.

“I have patients this afternoon.”

Of course he did.

The man who had helped poison me apparently still had appointments.

The absurdity nearly made me laugh, except my body could not do that either.

Mason left.

Olivia remained for another few seconds.

Her perfume drifted over the lilies, the same sandalwood scent I had bought her in Chicago on our tenth anniversary.

“You always had to control everything,” she murmured so quietly I almost missed it.

Then she followed him out.

That sentence stayed with me.

It was not the language of a woman who had killed solely for money.

There was resentment in it.

Old resentment.

Perhaps hatred.

The door opened repeatedly over the next hour.

People came to look at me.

My younger brother Daniel stood near the coffin without speaking for so long that I began counting his breaths.

He and I had barely spoken since Christmas.

Our last conversation ended with him accusing me of treating every family problem like something that could be solved by writing a check.

I had told him that was convenient criticism from a man who kept cashing them.

It had been a cruel sentence.

I had known it even while saying it.

Now Daniel touched the coffin and whispered, “You asshole.”

His voice broke on the second word.

“I was going to call you.”

I begged him to call me now.

Touch my hand.

Check my pulse.

Get angry enough to shake me.

Do anything.

Instead he sniffed and stepped away.

Our mother came next.

Hearing her nearly destroyed what little control remained in my mind.

She did not cry loudly.

She straightened something near my collar and said, “Your tie is crooked.”

That was all.

When I was nine, she had fixed my tie before my father's funeral with those exact words.

The memory came not as an image but as the sensation of her cold fingers beneath my chin.

“Hold still, Ethan.”

Thirty-four years later, I was holding still perfectly.

She kissed my forehead.

My entire consciousness seemed to rush toward the place her lips touched.

Mom.

Please.

Her hand remained against my cheek.

For one impossible second, I believed she had noticed warmth.

Then someone behind her said her name, and she withdrew.

Voices accumulated as the visitation began.

Coworkers, cousins, neighbors, investors, people I had not spoken to since college, and people Olivia had invited because funerals apparently had their own social mathematics.

Through their conversations I assembled fragments of what had happened after I collapsed.

Olivia had called emergency services.

Paramedics had taken me to St. Vincent's.

I had been pronounced dead after what someone called a catastrophic cardiac event.

The phrase sounded clean enough to put on stationery.

My recent dizziness and weakness had apparently made the death believable.

That was why they had been poisoning me gradually.

The final dose had not created the story.

It had finished one they had spent weeks writing inside my body.

A service began.

A minister spoke about my generosity.

Someone's child dropped what sounded like a plastic toy and was immediately shushed.

Denise gave a short remembrance about the night our servers crashed during the company's first year and I slept under my desk because I could not afford a hotel near the backup facility.

People laughed.

I had forgotten that night.

I had also forgotten how terrible Denise's coffee had been.

Then Olivia stood.

Her first words were followed by silence.

She had apparently begun crying.

“I don't know how to say goodbye to the person who built my life with me.”

If my body had obeyed me, I would have torn the coffin apart.

Instead I listened while my wife described our first apartment, our terrible refrigerator, the road trip to Maine when we got lost outside Portland, and the Sunday breakfasts I made badly but insisted on making anyway.

Every memory was true.

That made the lies unbearable.

She had not invented our marriage.

She had murdered something that had actually existed.

When the service ended, voices thinned.

Time moved forward.

Six o'clock moved closer.

Then, beneath the fading conversations, I heard a small electronic chirp near my right shoulder.

Another followed.

A woman muttered, “Why is that doing that?”

Marissa.

Something clicked.