Fake Names with Me Love Bombs for Her? Screw This Secret CEO Wife Is Done novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Open Grave
Maisie finds her father's grave dug up and learns on a police officer's phone that her husband is a billionaire engaged to someone else; she walks out, and the officer says his mother reported the grave an hour before it was found.
My father's grave was open when we got to Greenlawn at six in the morning.
He had been buried the afternoon before.
The caretaker met us at the gate with a flashlight he didn't need anymore.
"I'm sorry, ma'am," he said. "I've worked here nineteen years. I've never seen this."
The coffin sat on the grass beside the hole with its lid pried up.
Dad lay inside in the gray suit I had picked for him.
His left wrist was bare.
He had made me promise to bury him in his watch.
It was a cheap steel one with a cracked glass, and he had worn it since before I was born.
He made me say it twice, the last week, when he could barely lift his head.
Now somebody had taken it off him.
Gregory held me against his chest and kept one hand on the back of my head.
"Don't look, baby," he said. "Look at me. I'm going to handle all of it."
"Somebody dug up my dad."
"I know. I know."
"And they took his watch," I whispered into his coat. "They took the watch."
"Shh. Don't talk to the police without me, okay? Don't read anything on your phone today. Let me take care of everything."
I nodded into his coat.
That was what I always did.
Two officers were walking the edge of the grave with their lights low.
One of them came over with a notepad and asked for the family's names.
"Maisie Corrigan," I said. "Frank Corrigan was my father."
"And you, sir?"
"Gregory Conway," Gregory said. "I'm her husband."
I thought about that later, standing there.
When we had dinner out, the waiter called him Mr. Doyle.
When I was in the hospital with a kidney infection, he signed the form as Husband Carver.
Our wedding invitations said Mr. Conway, and he had never let me see our marriage certificate.
His office kept it safe, he said.
He was rich and he liked his privacy, and I had let all of it slide.
The officer wrote down Conway.
Then he looked at his phone, which had buzzed twice, and he frowned at the screen.
"Conway," he said. "That's funny. This says Werner."
Gregory's hand went still on my back.
"Werner Holdings," the officer said. He turned the phone around so the other officer could read it too. "CEO Gregory Werner and fiancée Poppy Sayer at the Children's Hospital gala last night."
He looked up at Gregory. "That's you in the picture, sir."
It was.
He was in a black tux, in the front row of a ballroom, with his arm around a woman in a green dress.
She was holding up her left hand to the camera.
The diamond on it was enormous.
The post was timestamped eight forty last night.
At eight forty, I had been in a church basement, handing out paper cups of coffee to the last guests from my father's funeral.
Gregory had left at five. A work thing, he said. He had kissed my forehead.
"It's PR, Maisie," Gregory said quickly. "It's for the company. Mother needs it. It doesn't mean anything."
"Is your name Conway?"
"It's complicated."
"Is it Doyle? Carver?"
"Baby, not here. Not in front of people."
The caretaker was looking at his boots.
The second officer had stopped walking the grave and was watching us.
Across the road, a van with a news logo had pulled up to the curb.
I slid my wedding ring off.
It came easily. I had lost weight since the diagnosis.
I took Gregory's hand off my back, put the ring in his palm and closed his fingers over it.
"My name is Maisie Corrigan," I said to the officer. "My father is Frank Corrigan. That man isn't my husband, and I don't know who he is."
"Maisie."
"Don't."
So I stepped out of the cemetery and left him standing there beside my father's open coffin.
Gregory called my name twice.
He didn't follow.
My phone buzzed in my coat. A text from him.
Please don't do anything. Trust me. I'll fix this.
"Ma'am?" the first officer called.
I turned around.
He had walked a few steps after me and he was holding his notepad against his chest.
"One more thing," he said, quietly. "Dispatch logged the first call about this grave at five this morning."
"The caretaker called it in."
"No, ma'am. The caretaker found it at six."
He nodded back at Gregory, who stood by the open coffin with my ring in his fist and his face gone white.
"The five o'clock call came from his mother," the officer said. "Mrs. Odile Werner."
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