After the death of my first love, I became a mortician.
When the movie star broke up with his first love, he married me in the blink of an eye. During our marriage, he never had any scandal or gossip.
That was until his first love returned. Suddenly, they could not wait to have a passionate relationship. Only then did I realize that my husband had faked his love?
As a response, I aborted our child. He went mad with anger, saying that I had spent so much time among the dead that I had become cold-blooded and cruel myself.
I ignored his tears and told him bluntly, "I did it because I don't want a child with you."
No one knew that I did not actually love him and the only reason I married him was for a dead man.
——
It was my third year as a mortician and also my third year of my marriage to Jeremy Holt, the movie star. Everyone thought our marriage would never last and they were right because Jeremy did not love me.
He married me out of spite, to get back at Carol Truman, his ex-girlfriend, who broke up with me. He purposedly tied the knot with someone she looked down upon.
I did not have any reason to refuse him. So, after I agreed to marry him, Jeremy acted as if he had forgotten his first love.
He would gaze into my eyes in the quiet hours of the night, softly whisper my name into my ear and ensure his closest friends addressed me as “Sister-in-law.” He gave me a sense of security I had never asked for.
In his most tender moments, he even introduced me to his parents. I would never meet them if I did not marry him.
I also did not understand proper dining etiquette or how to navigate their upper-class world, but Jeremy taught me patiently, with a smile on his face.
Later, I overheard his mother comment. There was a distaste in her voice when she complained, "That corpse handler is a lot worse than the actress."
I wanted to correct her. I was not a corpse handler; I was a makeup artist for the dead. Besides, Jeremy had never looked down on my profession.
Just when I thought life would move without any waves, Carol returned. Since then, Jeremy turned into a different person. He flaunted his love for her openly but he treated me coldly.
It was not until the doctor told me I was pregnant.
That very day, I caught Jeremy and Carol having intercourse on the countertop where I worked.
The doctor’s words still rang in my ears, "You’re two months and five days along.”
After I did the math, I realized it was exactly one day before Carol returned. That night with ragged breath, Jeremy whispered in my ears and begged me to give him a child.
I did not expect it to happen so quickly.
My hand drifted to my still-flat stomach, where I could almost feel the faint stirrings of life. For a moment, I didn’t know what to do.
Jeremy had not come home for days. The last time I saw him, he was coming home to pack his things.
“I’m going to Norway with Carol," he said.
Norway? It was the first place we came on our honeymoon.
I stayed silent and quietly helped him pack his clothes.
The silence was heavy. Jeremy glanced at me like I was a stranger. “I don’t need your help,” he said coldly.
So, I unlocked the door and went to grab something to eat. Suddenly, I noticed a sticky odor permeating the house and a few dusty footprints of men's shoes on the floor.
A sense of unease gripped me and I rushed to the one room in the house that was always locked.
However, the door was left ajar and the path toward the door was littered with assorted kinds of clothes. When I crept silently toward the door, I heard a woman moaning.
I always kept the door locked and Jeremy knew that I put my brother's urn there and he had never asked about anything.
However, just because he wanted to sleep with Carol, he asked someone to pick the lock.
I leaned against the door and watched them making love on my workbench. As I watched, I thought in the daze,
Didn’t they know this was the table where I worked?
Then, another thought struck me. Should I be worried?
