Step Aside, I'm the King of Capital novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: The Funeral

The funeral was on Tuesday at a stone chapel on the hill above the river.

Two hundred people came, most of them in work boots under their black coats.

They were forklift drivers and dock leads and night-shift supervisors, and every one of them stopped by Emerson to say the old woman had known their kids' names.

She shook each hand and said thank you, and her voice never broke.

I stood one step behind her in a borrowed suit.

Nobody asked who I was, and that suited me.

At the back of the chapel the doors opened, and the temperature seemed to drop.

Sullivan walked down the aisle in a black suit that had cost more than the casket.

Lavinia held his arm in a black dress and a pair of dark glasses.

Barnaby hurried out from the front pew to meet them, wringing his hands.

"Mr. S," he said. "You honor us."

"The loss is ours," Sullivan said, in the low velvet voice I had coached him on in a rented studio.

He gave a small bow to the casket.

Then his eyes slid over me without stopping.

Lavinia stopped.

She took off her dark glasses and looked at me, and then she smiled.

It was not a nice smile.

"Tristan," she said. "How sweet. Are you the caterer?"

A few heads turned.

"I'm the husband," I said.

"The what?"

"The husband," Emerson said, stepping up to my side.

She spoke clearly and not loudly, and the people near us went quiet.

"Lavinia Crane," Lavinia said, looking Emerson up and down. "I'd heard Emerson Lindahl was the cold-storage heir. I didn't know she was giving away her name to anyone who proposes in a ballroom."

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