They Buried Me Before I Was Dead

Rain doesn't care who it buries.

It fell the same way the morning my mother died. Cold. Steady. Like the sky had somewhere else to be and was only passing through. I stood at the edge of Greenwood Cemetery with a black veil pressed low over my face and watched rainwater soak through the white roses on my coffin.

My coffin.

I had to keep saying it in my head just to believe it.

My coffin. My funeral. My name on that headstone.

Simone Carter. Beloved wife. Beloved daughter. Beloved CEO of House of Carter.

Gone too soon.

Except I wasn't gone. I was standing fifty feet away in a borrowed coat, watching my own burial, and the only thing keeping me from walking forward and screaming was the knowledge that if Brian saw me — if he recognized me, I wouldn't survive the drive home.

Brian was in the charcoal Tom Ford suit I bought him for our fourth anniversary.

He stood at the front of the crowd with his head bowed and his hands clasped, and every few seconds he pressed two fingers beneath his eye.

Dabbing tears.

Except his eyes were dry.

I knew because I knew that face. I had slept beside it for seven years. I had watched it across boardroom tables and dinner tables and the table in our kitchen where he used to sit with his coffee and pretend to read the news while actually studying people. I knew every version of Brian Palmer's face.

This one was a performance.

A good one. Good enough that three women near the front were already pressing tissues to their eyes. Good enough that the journalists behind the rope barrier were photographing it like it was art.

He checked his watch.

Just a glance. Fast. The kind a person hopes no one notices.

Ten forty-seven.

I filed it away and said nothing, because there was no one to say anything to.

Brian never checked the time when he was nervous.

Only when he was waiting for something.

Melissa stood to his left.

My sister looked extraordinary in black. She always did. Long honey-blonde hair tucked beneath a wide-brimmed hat, oversized sunglasses hiding those emerald eyes even though the sky had nothing to offer but clouds. She had one arm wrapped around Cassie's small shoulders, holding her close, and from where I stood she looked like the picture of a grieving family.

She looked real.

That was what scared me most.

Cassie had on a white dress with black ribbons at the waist. My baby. Five years old, clutching her stuffed rabbit under one arm, standing at a funeral she didn't understand for a mother she didn't know was watching her from the back of the crowd.

She tugged at Melissa's sleeve.

"Auntie Mel." Her voice was small but it cut straight through the rain, straight through fifty feet of mourners and soft weeping, straight into the center of my chest. "When is Mommy coming home?"

Melissa looked down.

She crouched slowly, right there in the wet grass, until she was at Cassie's level. She pulled the ribbon on Cassie's dress straight. Tucked a damp curl behind her ear. Her expression did something complicated that I couldn't fully read from this distance — something that moved across her face like a shadow passing over water.

"Soon, baby," she said softly. "Soon."

I pressed my hand flat against my stomach under my coat.

I'm here, I told Cassie silently. I'm right here. I'm not leaving you.

The priest spoke about legacy and grace.

I didn't listen. I had been to enough funerals to know that the words were never really about the person in the ground. They were about making the living feel better about going home afterward.

I kept my eyes on Brian.

He accepted handshakes. He nodded at board members with the solemn dignity of a man carrying an unbearable weight. Nickolas James from the board gripped his shoulder and Brian leaned into it just slightly, just enough to look like a man who needed the support.

He checked his watch again.

Ten fifty-one.

Four minutes since the last time.

My jaw tightened beneath the veil.

I hadn't planned to come.

Clara had told me not to. She had sat across from me in her clinic three days ago with her arms folded and that steady unblinking look she'd had since university — the look that meant she was about to say something I wouldn't like.

"You're five weeks post-surgery," she said. "Your nerve endings are still healing. If you push yourself—"

"I have to see it," I said.

"Simone."

"Clara." I met her eyes. "I have to see what they did. I have to see it with my own eyes or I'll never believe it's real."

She was quiet for a moment. Then she stood, walked to the window, and looked out at the grey morning sky.

"One hour," she said finally. "Veil down. Distance. If anything feels wrong, you leave. Immediately."

I had agreed.

What neither of us said out loud was the other reason I needed to go. The thing she had told me eleven days ago, in that same quiet room, with her gloved hands still faintly stained from the last surgery she'd performed.

She had sat down across from me with her hands folded on her knees. She had taken one slow breath.

"There's something else," Clara said.

I remembered going very still.

"You're pregnant."

Eight weeks.

I was eight weeks pregnant, standing at my own funeral, watching my husband perform grief in a suit I bought him with money I earned building the company his name was now all over.

He didn't know.

Brian had no idea. And I needed it to stay that way because the moment he found out, the moment anyone connected to him found out, my baby became a target too.

I had survived the yacht, and I was going to survive this.

"Simone was everything," he said. His voice cracked on the last word. One clean break, like something snapping under pressure. "She was the company. She was our family. She was the reason I became the man I am today."

Two women in the front row started crying properly.

I thought about the night I sat with him at our kitchen table until two in the morning, coaching him through a board presentation. How to pause. When to make eye contact. How to let your voice break just enough to make a room lean toward you.

I taught you that, I thought. I built you, Brian. And you used it to bury me.

He walked to the coffin.

Leaned down slowly.

Pressed his lips against the lacquer.

One long, deliberate kiss. Like a man saying goodbye to the person he loved most in the world.

I watched his shoulders shake.

I watched Cassie reach up and touch his sleeve.

That was when I noticed the man standing apart.

He was tall. Dark coat. Positioned east of the main crowd near a row of older headstones, arms loose at his sides, no umbrella. The rain was soaking into his shoulders and he didn't seem to notice or care.

He wasn't crying.

He wasn't looking at the coffin or the priest or little Cassie in her white dress.

He was watching Brian.

Steady. Patient. The way you watch something when you're not sure yet what it is but you already know something is wrong with it. He had dark hair and a sharp jaw and a stillness about him that didn't belong at a funeral. Everyone else in that cemetery was performing some version of grief, real or borrowed.

This man was working.

I didn't know who he was. I didn't know why he was there. But something in me, the part of me that had pulled itself out of the water and refused to stop breathing recognized what he was doing.

He was looking for the same thing I was.

The truth.

The crowd began to thin.

People moved toward cars, opening umbrellas, murmuring in low voices. I stayed where I was. I told myself it was just one more minute.

He was moving toward the car. Cassie walked beside him, still holding her rabbit, her small hand swallowed in his. Melissa walked on his other side, close enough that their arms almost touched.

He stopped.

Not dramatically. Just a small pause, like a thought interrupting a step.

He turned.

His gaze moved slowly across the mourners still scattered near the grave. Across the older couple in grey near the east path. Across the cluster of House of Carter employees near the trees. Across the journalists behind the rope barrier.

And then it landed on me.

Brian Palmer looked directly at me.

My lungs locked.

Everything stopped.

The rain. The murmuring. Even the distant engine beyond the cemetery gates.

He sees me.

He sees me.

He sees me and it's over and I ran five weeks for nothing and my baby—

He kept walking.

His eyes moved on like I was a lamppost. Like I was just another stranger in black standing in the rain at a stranger's funeral. His gaze passed over me without a flicker of recognition and he turned back toward the car and kept walking and I stood there with my heart slamming so hard against my ribs I was sure the woman standing three feet to my left could hear it.

He didn't recognize me.

I started breathing again.

Slow. Careful. One inch at a time.

That was when the hand closed around my arm from behind.

Firm. Steady. The grip of someone who was not asking permission.

I went rigid.

"Don't run."

A man's voice. Low, close to my ear, barely above the sound of the rain.

"Don't make a scene. Don't pull away."

A pause.

"I know you're alive, Ms. Carter."

The world tilted.

"And we need to talk. Right now."