My Fake-Dead Husband Came Crawling After I Became an Heiress novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Back From the Dead
At a mall, Hallie hears her husband and adopted sister, dead three years, laugh about letting her take the blame, and Maureen's baby gift makes her understand the funeral was a lie. Maureen adds that Hallie signs for her inheritance on Friday and Dalton will come back to life the next day.
Two gurneys came through the hospital doors, each one covered with a white sheet.
I was standing in the corridor in front of forty people.
My mother crossed the floor and slapped me so hard my ear rang.
"You drugged Dalton and got into his bed," she said, and her voice broke. "I kept you in this family anyway. I always kept you."
"Mom, I never..."
"Now you put that video online and they're both dead. How am I supposed to bear it?"
The video was of my husband and my adopted sister in a hotel bed, and it had been everywhere since morning.
I had not posted it.
Nobody asked me, and I did not offer, because by then I half believed her.
The whole corridor had already decided I was the reason two people jumped.
A nurse covered her mouth. A man in the waiting area lifted his phone to film me.
Dalton's mother told a security guard to walk me out.
I asked to see their faces.
My mother and Dalton's mother signed for the bodies, and the sheets stayed down.
At Cora's funeral my mother stood in the chapel door and shook her head at me.
Dalton had left me nothing, not a note or a text.
The Fenns changed the locks before I could pack my second bag.
I left Cleveland that night, and for three years I didn't come back.
Then a man named Bernard Appleton found me in a laundromat in Tulsa and told me I was his daughter.
I had never met him, and my mother had always told me my father was dead.
On Friday I was signing his whole company into my name.
I landed that morning, and his chief of staff, Zane Overton, drove me straight from the airport.
He waited in the car at the east doors while I went into the Galleria to buy a box of shortbread for Bernard.
The maternity store was on the way.
I looked in only because I was walking past.
A pregnant woman stood inside with her head down, going through a rack of tiny hats.
She was seven or eight months along.
A tall man was crouched in front of her, tying her loose shoelace.
He wore a grey coat, and his hair was shorter.
It was Dalton.
My husband, who had jumped off a hotel roof three years ago, was tying a shoe in a mall.
I put my back against a pillar and stopped breathing.
The woman looked up, and she smiled the way she always smiled when she wanted something.
It was Cora.
"Dalton," she said sweetly. "When we let Hallie take the blame for us, did you ever feel bad?"
She held out a paper cup of lemonade, and he drank it without looking at it, the way he always had.
"She drugged me to get me into her bed," he said. "Three quiet years for you was the best thing she ever did with her life."
Cora laughed and leaned her head against his shoulder.
I took out my phone with a hand I could not feel.
I did not scream or step out from the pillar.
I pressed record.
The shop door swung open, and my mother walked out with two shopping bags.
She had pearls in her ears and a camel coat I had never seen.
She looked younger than she had at the morgue.
She took a small silver lock from a bag, the kind you hang on a baby for a long life, and held it against Cora's belly.
"My early present for my grandbaby," she said.
Dalton stood and kissed my mother's cheek.
I stayed there with the phone up and understood what the sheets had been for.
Nobody had died.
My husband and my sister had walked out of that hospital, and I was the one they buried.
For three years I had slept in cheap rooms, sure that I had killed two people.
In my coat pocket was Dalton's wedding ring, which I had kept the whole time.
My phone buzzed against it with a text from Zane.
"Everything all right in there? You've been twenty minutes."
I did not answer.
My mother turned her head toward the escalator, and I pulled back behind the pillar.
"Maureen," Dalton said, "are you sure about the lawyer?"
"I spoke to Bernard Appleton's lawyer on Monday," my mother said, not quietly. "Hallie signs on Friday."
"She really got it all?" Cora asked.
"Every bit. She's not even the kind to ask what it's worth."
"Then Saturday," Dalton said.
My mother nodded.
"Saturday you come back from the dead, you walk up to her as her husband, and a husband gets half of everything she owns."
Cora patted her belly and smiled.
"And if she says no?"
My mother laughed, a small warm laugh I knew from every Christmas of my childhood.
"She never has."
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