After Faking My Death, I Refuse to Forgive Anyone novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Closed Casket

From a rented room she watches her own funeral by livestream as her sister wears her pearls and the family fights over the will, until the trustee stands up and freezes everything.

I watched my own funeral from a room above a laundromat in Albany.

It cost forty dollars a night, cash, and the window looked out on a bus stop.

The church had put the service online for relatives who could not travel.

I propped the burner phone against a pillow, sat cross-legged on the bed and pressed play.

The casket at the front was white and closed.

It was empty, because the sheriff's divers had found nothing but a shoe.

My husband walked to the lectern in a black suit I had picked out for him.

He cried well.

He told two hundred people that I had been the love of his life, and that he should have seen how much I was hurting.

I had never wanted to throw something at a screen so badly.

My mother sat in the front pew in black wool with her spine perfectly straight.

She did not cry at all.

She held a folded handkerchief in her lap, and the whole church admired her for her strength.

Beside her sat Lindy.

My sister wore a black sheath dress.

Around her neck was my grandmother's pearl necklace, the one I had worn on my wedding day.

I put down my coffee.

The pearls had been in my jewelry box in the bedroom I shared with Neal, and nobody had asked me about them.

Lindy touched them twice during the first hymn.

I picked up the scissors from the bedside table, where I had left them from the night before.

I gathered my braid in one fist and cut it off at the nape.

It came away in a single heavy rope, ash-blonde and as long as my forearm.

I set it on the pillow and went on watching.

The camera followed them to the lake house afterward, because Neal had hired a videographer for a memorial video.

The man had left a camera running on a tripod in the living room, and the feed went out to the church's page.

Nobody remembered it was on.

Forty people stood around my grandmother's piano eating small sandwiches.

My mother came in last and stood by the fireplace, and the room turned toward her.

"Thank you all for coming," she said. "My daughter would have been touched."

She was good at that.

Within ten minutes Neal had steered her into the corner by the bookshelves, and Lindy had followed.

The camera caught them, small and clear.

"The will," Neal said, low. "Calvin Sanborn is in the hall. He asked for the family."

"Then give him the family," my mother said.

A man in a rumpled tweed jacket came in from the hall carrying a leather folder.

He was broad through the shoulders, with black hair going gray at the sides and round steel glasses.

I knew him.

I had met him once, at my grandmother's funeral, when he was a junior in her lawyer's office.

He had handed me a tissue and said nothing, which was why I remembered him.

"Mrs. Underhill," he said, "I'm sorry for your loss."

"Thank you, Mr. Sanborn."

"I'd like to read something to the family now, if you can all give me five minutes."

"Now?" said Neal. "We're in the middle of a wake."

"Gillian's will names you, her mother and her sister in equal thirds," Calvin said.

"The will she signed eleven months ago."

Neal smiled, tight with relief.

My mother's hand moved to her handkerchief.

Lindy let out a little breath and touched the pearls again.

I remembered the stack of papers Neal had put in front of me last November, with a pen and a glass of wine.

I had signed all of it, because he had asked me to and I trusted him.

"But the money isn't in the will," Calvin said.

"The Underhill trust holds everything of substance, and I am its independent trustee."

He opened the folder.

"Under section nine, when a beneficiary's death is uncertain, the trustee may suspend all distributions for up to eighteen months pending inquiry."

"Uncertain," said my mother.

"There is no body, Mrs. Underhill."

The room had gone quiet around them.

Forty people were listening, holding their plates.

"As of this afternoon," Calvin said, "I am exercising section nine."

"That's absurd," Neal said, and his voice came out higher than he meant it to.

"My wife drowned. Everybody saw the boat."

"I saw the boat too," said Calvin.

He took off his glasses and cleaned them on his tie.

"What I saw was a skiff with its drain plug missing."

"The plug was not in the bilge, and it was not in the water."

"A woman who tips a boat on purpose does not usually pull the plug first."

Lindy stared at him with her mouth a little open.

"What are you saying?" said my mother.

Calvin put his glasses back on.

For a moment he did not look at her, or at Neal, or at the room.

He turned his head and looked straight into the camera on its tripod.

It was as if he knew exactly who sat on the other side of it.

"I'm saying I don't believe she drowned," he said.

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