Chapter 3
The hospital tablet had been propped against a water pitcher, its screen trembling whenever the air vent kicked on. On it, Grant stood beside my empty casket while the memorial service unfolded beneath a sky the color of old tin.
Daniel sat in the chair near my bed. He didn’t ask whether I wanted to keep watching. He only moved the pitcher, steadying the tablet with two careful fingers.
The room smelled of antiseptic and overripe lilies. Someone had sent the flowers after the fire, addressed to a woman everyone believed was gone. Their sweetness turned my stomach.
Grant wore the black suit I’d bought him for our fifth anniversary.
The sight of it opened something tender before I could stop it: Grant laughing in our kitchen, trying to tie the same tie while I told him he was doing it wrong. Then the camera showed his hand resting on the casket, and the memory snapped shut.
“I can turn it off,” Daniel said.
“No.” My voice rasped. I reached for my phone. “I want a copy.”
The livestream camera drew close to Grant’s face. He looked exhausted, his eyes red, his voice rough in just the right places. He spoke about the years we’d shared, about how fiercely I’d wanted our son, about the future that had vanished in one terrible night.
Every sentence was polished enough to pass for grief.
When he said Noah’s name, the monitor beside my bed kept its steady rhythm. My son was somewhere down the hall, alive and small and beyond my reach. I pressed the phone harder against my palm.
Grant bowed his head. Behind him, Brooke Ellis stood in black, her mouth drawn tight with sorrow. When Grant faltered, she touched his arm. The gesture was brief and familiar. She lowered her eyes as the cameras found her.
“Devastated,” I whispered.
Daniel watched the screen, not me. “She knows she’s being watched.”
“Then she knows exactly what to do.”
The service moved outside to the cemetery. People filled the frame: employees in dark coats, neighbors I recognized, strangers carrying umbrellas. They lined up to offer Grant condolences. He shook each hand, accepting their sympathy as if it were something he’d earned.
A Northstar employee stepped forward. I knew her face, though not her name. She held Grant’s hand between both of hers and said something the microphone didn’t catch. He leaned down to hear her, then gave her the same hollow, grateful smile he’d offered everyone else.
Daniel shifted in his chair. “You don’t have to sit through the rest.”
“I do if he’s going to show me what he’s doing.”
I opened the camera app and started recording the livestream. My hand shook, so I braced my wrist against the blanket. I wasn’t sure what I expected to catch. A slip. A glance between Grant and Brooke that would crack open the performance.
Instead, the camera followed Grant to a small podium beneath a white tent. He thanked everyone for coming. He thanked Northstar’s crews for keeping the company’s work moving during a painful week.
Then he set a document on the podium.
I leaned closer. The screen blurred as the camera adjusted. Grant lifted the top page and turned it toward the audience. For a moment, the heading was visible.
REQUEST FOR TEMPORARY VOTING AUTHORITY.
My skin prickled. I kept recording.
“Northstar has always been more than a business to Mara,” Grant said. “It was her mother’s life’s work, and she cared deeply about its future.”
Brooke stepped close enough to be seen beside him.
“We all know Mara would want the company protected,” she said, her voice carrying cleanly through the microphone. “Grant is doing what he can to make sure Northstar’s crews and patients aren’t left in uncertainty.”
She sounded as though she were speaking for me.
The camera shifted. Grant’s fingers covered the bottom of the page, but not before I caught a line beneath the heading: my name, typed in full. Below it, a sentence about temporary authority over my shares.
I couldn’t read the rest.
“Can you zoom in?” I asked.
Daniel leaned toward the tablet, but the image had already moved. Grant had laid the page down. “Not from this feed.”
The words still burned behind my eyes. “He brought that to my memorial.”
“He wants people to see it,” Daniel said.
I didn’t answer. My gaze stayed on the frozen image of Grant’s hand over the page.
The suit hurt more than the document. I hated that. I hated the old warmth it brought back, the certainty of his body beside mine, the ordinary mornings when I’d believed I knew the man I married. For a breath, grief rose so quickly I couldn’t tell whether I was mourning that marriage or the woman who had trusted it.
Then the camera showed Brooke leaning into him again.
The softness inside me hardened—not into courage, exactly, but into something I could use. I checked that my recording was still running and saved it.
Grant resumed his speech. He spoke of continuity. He spoke of responsibility. He never said the fire was under investigation. He never said he had left me behind. He never said he believed I would die.
Each omission sat between us like another piece of evidence, though I didn’t yet know how to prove it.
When the memorial ended, the livestream didn’t cut. The camera followed Grant as people gathered around him beneath the tent. A reporter pushed through with a microphone.
“Mr. Hart, what happens to Northstar now?”
Grant glanced toward Brooke. She gave a small nod.
“Mara’s death is still being formally addressed,” he said. “But the company can’t stop functioning while people decide what comes next.”
My fingers tightened around the phone.
“Have you asked the board for authority over her shares?” the reporter pressed.
Grant lifted the document from the podium. “I’ve asked Northstar’s leadership to meet urgently. This request is temporary. It’s about keeping the company steady until everything is settled.”
Brooke stood at his shoulder, her expression grave. “The crews need certainty,” she added. “So do the families who depend on them.”
Daniel’s chair creaked as he leaned forward. “He’s tying your death to the company’s needs.”
“He’s making it sound like the same thing.”
“Because he wants people to accept it that way.”
On-screen, Grant placed the document back on the podium. A gust of wind lifted one corner. He pinned it with his palm.
The camera caught him looking down at my name.
For the first time all morning, his grief seemed to slip—not into guilt, but impatience. It lasted less than a second. Then he raised his eyes to the reporter and said Northstar’s leadership would meet the next morning.
The company had not confirmed my death. Still, Grant was already asking it to decide what my absence meant.
He thanked the reporter and turned away. Brooke followed.
The stream ended with the camera pointed at the empty casket.
I stopped recording. My thumb hovered over the saved video, where Grant’s request sat in the middle of my funeral like a second body.
“He’s moving before I can leave this room,” I said.
Daniel didn’t tell me everything would be all right. He didn’t offer comfort the evidence couldn’t support.
May you like
He just sat beside me while the screen went dark.
On it, Grant had announced the meeting. Tomorrow morning, he would ask Northstar to give him temporary authority over my shares.
