Pushed Overboard Pregnant, I Crashed My Husband's Wedding novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Dead Wife Watches

From the boathouse Hallie watches Wesley mourn her on television, learns he filed an insurance claim before the cruise, and agrees to Mason's rules until Saturday.

I woke on a cot in the boathouse with the baby kicking my bladder and a gray light in the windows.

For one second I thought I was home.

Then my shoulders ached where Wesley's hands had been, and I remembered.

Mason stood at the stove with his back to me, frying eggs.

"You slept all night and into the morning," he said. "Eat before you do anything."

"I don't have a phone."

"I know."

He put a plate in front of me and a cup of tea beside it.

I ate every bite, because my daughter needed it, and I hated that my hands were steady while I did.

A small television sat on a shelf above the workbench.

Mason turned it on without asking and sat on an overturned crate.

"Watch," he said.

The noon news was already running.

A reporter stood on the Langford dock with the Marguerite tied up behind her.

*The search for Hallie Winslow Langford, twenty-eight, resumes this afternoon after she went overboard on Saturday evening.*

My photo filled the screen.

It was the one from my wedding, and I was laughing at something Whitney had said.

Then the camera cut to Wesley.

He stood at a podium in a black suit, with his father one step behind him.

His eyes were red and wet.

His voice cracked in all the right places.

"My wife could never swim well," he said. "She was afraid of deep water. I should have kept her inside."

I put my fork down.

"I swam four years," I said. "I have a medal in a box in the hall closet."

"I know," Mason said. "He's rewriting you."

"Why?"

"So that when you're gone, the story is already finished."

The reporter read from a page.

"The Langford family's attorney has confirmed that the family will also pursue an insurance claim for the loss of mother and unborn child."

The camera showed a man in a gray suit holding a folder.

"Wesley raised his wife's coverage three weeks ago, out of love and foresight," the lawyer said. "He filed the final paperwork Saturday morning, before they ever sailed, because he wanted the family protected."

I stopped breathing.

"Before they sailed," I said.

Mason did not blink.

"Saturday morning," I said. "He filed a claim on me before he put me on the boat."

"Yes."

"That's not foresight."

"No," he said. "That's a receipt."

I was on my feet and I did not remember standing.

The cot shook behind me.

The screen cut to the dock again, and my mother was standing at the edge of a crowd in her gray raincoat.

Mom was sixty-one.

She had come straight from her kitchen, with her apron still showing under the raincoat.

A deputy took her arm and said something gentle, and she put one hand over her mouth.

Then her legs went out from under her, and two strangers caught her before she hit the boards.

"Mom!" I said.

I was at the door with my hand on the latch.

Mason was there before I got it open.

He did not grab me.

He just put his body in the doorway and his palm flat on the frame above my head.

"Move," I said.

"If you walk out now, you're a woman with no phone, no proof and a missing-person report," he said. "Wesley's father has a family doctor who signs anything. You'd be in a quiet room by dark."

"That's my mother."

"I know. She'll be fine."

"She just fainted!"

"She'll be fine because there are two hundred people around her and a medic on that dock." His voice stayed low and even. "And she'll be better on Saturday, when you walk onto that lawn alive and they can't take it back."

I stared up at him.

He was close enough that I could smell salt and engine grease on his jacket.

"What's Saturday?" I asked.

"The wedding. I think you want to be there."

I did.

I had not known it until he said it, and then I wanted it so hard that my hands shook.

I wanted Whitney to turn and see me on that lawn.

I wanted Wesley to hear the whole town gasp.

"Why would you help me do that?" I asked. "You don't know me."

"I have three rules," Mason said, ignoring my question. "Until Saturday you do what I say, you ask me nothing about myself, and you tell me no lies."

"That's a hard way to ask for trust."

"I'm not asking for trust. I'm asking for Saturday."

On the television, a woman had stepped up beside Wesley, her hand tucked into his arm.

"Agree or don't," Mason said. "The door's yours."

He took his hand off the frame.

I looked at the boathouse, the cot and the tea going cold.

I looked at my own face on the screen, gone and mourned.

"Fine," I said. "Saturday. Your rules."

He nodded once and went back to the stove.

I turned to the television, and my skin went cold again.

Whitney stood beside Wesley in a soft black dress, her honey hair pinned up.

At her throat was my grandmother's pearl necklace.

I had left it in my jewelry box at home, in the top drawer, under my passport.

Her voice shook in all the right places too.

"Hallie always told me she was terrified of the water," Whitney said. "I begged her not to go."

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