Chapter 20:

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From here, I could see the ocean. It stretched out beyond the cemetery gates, vast and indifferent and impossibly beautiful, the moonlight turning its surface into a field of broken silver. I had always loved the ocean—had mentioned it once, casually, years ago, in a conversation Jasper had apparently filed away in the permanent archive of his memory. He’d chosen this spot for me. Not the cheapest plot. Not the most convenient. The one with the view I’d always wanted.

Jasper was the only one who had ever truly known my tastes. The only one who listened not just to what I said, but to what I meant.

Dominic, however, saw none of this beauty. He saw only the inscription—Wife of Jasper Langley—and something inside him detonated.

He went straight for the headstone. Both hands. No hesitation. He pushed it with a force that seemed to come from somewhere older and uglier than anger—a possessiveness so deep it had roots in bone. The marble resisted for a moment, then tipped backward and hit the earth with a sound like a door slamming at the end of a very long hallway.

Then he started to dig.

My ashes. He was digging for my ashes. Clawing at the earth with his bare hands, dirt accumulating under his fingernails, his breath ragged, his movements frantic—the desperation of a man who has lost something he never held and now believes that holding it, even in the form of dust, will somehow close the wound.

My heart—whatever tattered remnant of it still functioned—filled with a desperation that mirrored his own but pointed in the opposite direction. Stop, I wanted to scream. Stop digging. Stop claiming. Stop reaching for me with hands that never reached when reaching would have mattered.

In life, I had believed Dominic could give me a home. A place to belong. A fixed point in a world that had been spinning since the day my parents—my real parents, the ones whose faces I couldn’t remember—had given me away. He didn’t. He gave me a house full of silence and a marriage full of ghosts.

And now, even after my death, he wouldn’t let me rest. Wouldn’t let the earth have me. Wouldn’t let Jasper’s inscription stand. Wouldn’t allow me the one thing I’d never had in life: peace.

I lunged at him. Slapped his back with every ounce of fury my dissolving soul could muster. My hand passed through him like light through glass—no resistance, no impact, no sensation. Just the silent, humiliating confirmation that I was powerless. That I had always been powerless. That even death hadn’t granted me the authority to make this man stop hurting me.

𝗦𝘩a𝘳𝗲 yo𝘶𝗿 fa𝘷𝗼𝘳іt𝖾ѕ 𝘧rо𝗺 𝗴𝗮𝗹𝗇o𝘷еlѕ.cо𝗆

In life, I couldn’t decide my own death. In death, I couldn’t decide my own rest. The symmetry was cruel enough to be intentional.

“Dominic, damn you!”

The voice didn’t come from me. It came from behind us—real, physical, loud enough to scatter birds from the trees—and it was followed immediately by a fist connecting with Dominic’s jaw. The sound was dense and final, like a gavel striking wood.

Jasper. Of course, Jasper.

He materialized out of the darkness like a man who’d been waiting for exactly this moment—perhaps he had been. His eyes were red. His clothes were wrinkled in the particular way of someone who has been sleeping in them, or not sleeping at all. He looked like he’d been running on caffeine and grief and the particular fuel that only righteous anger can provide.

“Let go!” Dominic snarled, blood already blooming on his lower lip. His gaze was wild, possessive, the look of a dog guarding a bone it stole. “What right do you have to write that Maren is your wife? She’s mine! Even dead, she’s still mine!”

Jasper’s smile was a razor blade.

“Because you don’t deserve her.”

Four words. Four perfectly weighted, surgically aimed, devastatingly accurate words. The kind that don’t need volume to land. The kind that find their target in the dark.

They launched at each other again—fists, elbows, the graceless choreography of two men fighting not to win but to feel something besides the unbearable weight of loss. They rolled in the dirt beside my overturned headstone, grunting and bleeding and cursing, and I—I sat down on the fallen marble, crossed my legs, and began swinging my feet.

There was nothing else to do. Two men were fighting over a woman who was sitting right there and couldn’t be seen by either of them. If there was a metaphor in that, I was too tired to unpack it.

Truthfully, I liked the headstone. The marble was smooth and cool, and even toppled, it had a solidity that felt reassuring—the first solid thing I’d touched, or almost touched, in months. And from here, sitting on my own grave, I could see the ocean. Moonlit. Endless. Completely indifferent to the two bleeding men rolling in the dirt ten feet away.

Jasper had chosen well. He always did. He was the only person who ever listened closely enough to know what I wanted—not what I said I wanted, not what I settled for, but the real thing, the quiet thing, the wish I’d whispered once and assumed no one heard.

The ocean heard everything. And Jasper, somehow, had heard it too.

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