On the day of my funeral, Grayson did what he thought was right. He dressed in the black suit I had always loved, showing up at my funeral with an air of solemnity. Liam had initially tried to stop him from coming, but in the end, Mom had convinced him. After all, Grayson was my legal spouse.
Friends and family gathered to say their farewells. What did it matter? I was gone, and it wasn’t as though they could speak ill of me now, not while my body was being buried in the ground.
Even my mother–in–law came. She was already a frail, tiny woman, but seeing her there made her appear decades older.
Grayson knelt before my gravestone, convinced he was performing some act of atonement. But to me, his presence was nothing more than repulsive.
After the funeral, he returned to the small apartment. Alice, starved for three days, lay there, barely clinging to life. The moment she saw Grayson, fear overtook her–a fear she
couldn’t hide.
“Grayson, I know I was wrong,” Alice said, her voice trembling. “I shouldn’t have pretended to be Belle. I shouldn’t have come back, shouldn’t have tried to drive a wedge between you and her. I truly know now that I was wrong.”
I could see the fear in her eyes, the kind of fear that comes when someone believes they might starve to death in the same way she’d been left to wither for days.
“Tell me, how did the baby really die? Did Belle push you?”
Alice hesitated, caught in a moment of indecision, whether to speak the truth or not.
“Alice, you’ve got one chance to tell me the truth.”
“Belle didn’t push me,” Alice admitted, “it was all my doing. I staged it.”
“Why?” Grayson’s voice was harder now, demanding.
