His Test Was Fake, But My Death Was Real novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: An Empty Coffin

The Family buries Maeve while she watches from across the water. Stefano is handed the hospital letter.

They buried me on Thursday.

Dario's boat sat at anchor in the cove below the Carrano cemetery, a hundred yards from my own grave.

I stood at the rail in a borrowed grey coat and watched the hearse come up the hill.

"Closed casket," Dario said beside me, and handed me the binoculars. "The hospital told them the poison made it impossible to open."

"What's in it?"

"Sandbags and a pillow."

"Aldo agreed to that?"

"Aldo agreed to anything that ended the scandal quickly."

I raised the binoculars.

The whole Family had come.

The lieutenants stood in two rows in black suits, and not one of them had a phone in his hand.

Last night they had been laughing on a bridge.

Today they would not lift their eyes from the ground.

The coffin went down onto its stand beside the open grave.

Aldo stood at its head with his heavy gold ring catching the light.

He spoke for under a minute, and he did not say my name once.

Stefano's mother sat in the front row with her hand over her mouth.

She was the one who had fainted in the mourning hall, because nobody had told her it was a game.

Stefano stood beside the coffin.

He wore a black overcoat and carried nothing.

There were no roses.

His face was grey, and he kept staring at the lid.

"He hasn't slept," I said.

"No."

"Good."

Dario said nothing, and I was glad of it.

Then Camille walked down the row.

She wore a black dress and a black veil, and she took the seat at the edge of the front row, the one that belonged to the bride.

She put her hand on Stefano's arm.

I held the binoculars so tightly my knuckles hurt.

"She's sitting in my chair," I said.

"I see it."

"She brought me tea for three nights."

"I know."

"She sat next to me, and she held my hand, and all that time she was waiting for me to fail."

Dario laid his hand over mine on the rail.

He did not squeeze it or say it would be all right.

He simply left it there, warm and heavy, until my fingers stopped shaking.

I noticed that it was warm.

I noticed that I did not move my hand away.

Down on the hill, Stefano's mother stood up.

She walked along the front row to Camille and said something I could not hear.

Camille tried to smile.

The slap carried across the water.

It was loud enough that the lieutenants flinched, and a crow lifted off the cemetery wall.

"You staged a death to prove a point," Stefano's mother said, and now I could hear her, because the whole hillside had gone silent. "A girl is in that box because of your game."

"Mrs. Carrano, I only wanted..."

"Get out of my seat."

Camille stood slowly with one hand against her cheek.

For the first time since the bridge, I saw her without her smile.

She said nothing, and she did not leave.

She stepped back one pace and stood behind Stefano with her veil lowered.

"She's not going to learn anything from a slap," I said.

"No," Dario said. "That one is from a mother. She'll learn from the Family."

"What does that mean?"

"Ask me in a week."

Aldo nodded to the priest.

The ropes creaked, and my empty coffin went down into the earth.

I felt nothing at all, and that frightened me more than anything had.

Six years of Sundays at Aldo's table were in that box, and a ring, and a name.

And something else I could not name, something small that had been there for seven weeks.

I put my free hand on my stomach.

Dario's hand was still on the other.

Then a man in a dark suit came down the path from the cemetery gate.

He was not one of the lieutenants.

He carried a thin white envelope with a hospital stamp on it, and he walked straight to Stefano.

"Mr. Carrano," I heard him say. "The hospital asked me to give you this in person. It's the release form for your fiancée."

Stefano took it.

He opened it as the first shovelful of earth hit the lid.

I watched him read.

He read it once and then he started over from the top.

His thumb stopped halfway down the page and stayed there.

"That's the line," Dario said quietly. "The doctor wrote it under the date, as you told her to."

"Seven weeks," I said.

"Yes."

His hand dropped to his side.

The paper slid out of his fingers, and Camille bent quickly to pick it up.

Stefano caught her wrist before she touched it.

He did not look at her.

He looked at the grave.

Then his knees gave way, and he went down into the wet grass in front of the whole Family.

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