"Your father left instructions," Sebastian had said, his face inches from mine in the harsh fluorescent light of the trauma bay. "If you ever got hurt, I am to be notified first."
"What are you talking about?" I demanded. I pushed myself up on my uninjured arm, ignoring the sharp spike of pain in my shoulder. "My father has been dead for three years."
"Dead men can still leave orders," Sebastian replied, his tone infuriatingly calm.
"I don't know who you are," I said, my voice rising. "But you need to back away."
Before he could answer, my phone vibrated against the metal bed rail. The caller ID flashed Hudson ICU.
I snatched the device with trembling fingers. "Hello?"
"Ms. Vance," the nurse said through the speaker, brisk but gentle. "Your mother went into sudden cardiac arrest. We couldn't resuscitate her."
The phone slipped from my grip, clattering onto the floor.
Three days later, I stood in the mud.
Rain lashed against the cemetery grass in thick, heavy sheets. A sharp gust of wind caught my black umbrella, snapping the metal spokes upward. The fabric flipped inside out with a loud, violent crack. I tossed the useless frame aside, letting the storm batter my face.
I dropped to my knees beside the open earth. The gravediggers had left a small mound of dirt near the edge, retreating to their trucks to wait out the downpour.
"Just me today, Mom," I said to the wooden lid resting at the bottom of the pit. "Just me."
I dug my bare fingers into the wet soil. The mud was freezing, caking under my fingernails. I scooped up a heavy handful and threw it onto the lowered casket. The hollow thud echoed over the empty lawn.
I pulled my phone from my coat pocket. Water pooled on the cracked screen, distorting the glass. I hit the microphone icon, recording an audio message to Julian.
"The burial is over," I said into the receiver. "Are you coming?"
Send.
I stared at the gray bubble. No read receipt.
I pressed the button again. "I am standing here alone, Julian. The cemetery is empty. I need you."
Send.
The rain plastered my hair to my cheeks. I held the button down a third time.
"Please."
Send.
I knelt in the mud, staring at the screen. One minute passed. Then two. Then three. The cold seeped through my wool coat, chilling my bones.
The phone chimed with a banking notification.
Julian Ashford sent you $100.
Message: Buy a hot tea. Swamped right now.
"Swamped," I repeated aloud. The word tasted like ash on my tongue.
I swiped away the banking alert. Underneath it sat a social media notification from an old mutual friend. A tagged photo. I tapped the alert, bringing the image up on my screen.
Julian stood in the center of a brightly lit room, holding a flute of champagne. He wore the charcoal suit I had picked up from the dry cleaners yesterday. His arm wrapped securely around Bianca's waist, pulling her flush against his side. She was smiling, holding up a paintbrush like a trophy.
The caption read: Celebrating the grand opening of Bianca's new gallery! So proud of our favorite artist.
Bianca. The woman who had abandoned him three years ago for a European art tour, leaving me to patch up his ruined life and fund his failing company. Now she was back.
He wasn't swamped. He was celebrating his ex-fiancée's art show while I buried my mother alone.
I locked the screen, shoved the phone into my pocket, and pushed myself up from the mud.
That was when I saw the flowers.
A pristine bouquet of white camellias rested at the head of my mother's gravestone. The stems were bound tightly with a thick black ribbon. I hadn't brought them. The cemetery staff certainly hadn't left them.
I stepped closer, my boots sinking deep into the sodden earth. A small, cream-colored card was tucked between the wet petals. I pulled it free.
The elegant, looping handwriting was unmistakable.
"A substitute should always know her place," I read aloud, my voice cutting through the howling wind.
I stared at the ink as the rain began to smear the letters. Bianca had sent them. She had tracked down the cemetery, ordered the flowers, and timed the delivery perfectly.
I reached out and grabbed the nearest camellia. I snapped the thick green stem. The white petals fluttered down, landing in the dark mud.
"One," I said.
I grabbed another. Snap.
"Two."
I tore the blooms from the bouquet one by one, methodical and silent.
"Three. Four. Five."
The black ribbon loosened as the bundle thinned out. The heavy silk slipped down the remaining stems, pooling on the granite marker.
"Six. Seven. Eight."
I closed my freezing fingers around the ninth flower. Snap. I dropped it onto the pile of ruined white petals.
I stopped. Nine ruined flowers.
My dry eyes stung in the wind. A thin, rasping laugh escaped me, wrong and lonely in the sprawling cemetery.
I folded Bianca's card in half, then in quarters, pressing the creases flat with my dirty thumbs. I slipped the wet square into the inner pocket of my coat.
Heavy gravel crunched behind me.
"I told you to stay off that shoulder," a deep voice called out over the rain.
I turned sharply.
Sebastian Reed stood at the end of the narrow path beneath a black umbrella. In a tailored charcoal suit, he looked nothing like the doctor I had met under hospital lights.
"Why are you following me?" I asked, my voice hardening.
"I am not following you," Sebastian replied. He stepped forward, closing the distance between us. "I am fulfilling an obligation."
"I don't need a doctor right now."
"I am not here as your doctor."
"Then leave," I told him, pointing toward the cemetery gates. "This is a private burial."
"You are burying her alone," he said, glancing over the empty lawn. "That is not privacy. It is abandonment."
My jaw tightened. "Watch your mouth."
"I watch the facts, Ms. Vance."
"Here is a fact for you. My mother spent her last night waiting for a man who never came. Now she is being lowered into the ground, and the same man is drinking champagne with his mistress. I have had enough spectators."
Sebastian's gaze moved to the mud on my knees and the broken camellias at my feet. "I was not watching him."
"No?"
"I was watching to see when you stopped defending him."
The answer struck too close. Even after the unanswered calls, some stubborn part of me had still expected Julian's car to appear at the cemetery gate. I had imagined him running through the rain, tie loose, apology ready. I hated that Sebastian could see the hope I had not managed to kill.
"You know nothing about what I defended."
"I know about the pocket watch," he said.
My breath caught.
Rain drummed against the umbrella between us. No one knew about the watch. The dealer had promised discretion, and I had told Julian the money came from a relative. Even my mother believed the watch was locked in a safe-deposit box.
"Who told you?"
"Your father."
"My father was dead before I sold it."
"He knew you might." Sebastian's voice softened, though his posture did not. "He said you would sacrifice the last thing bearing his initials before you admitted the man beside you had failed. He was right."
I stepped beneath the edge of his umbrella before I realized I had moved. "If you knew, why didn't you stop me?"
"Because I was under orders not to interfere with your choices."
"Convenient orders."
"Cruel ones," he said. "There is a difference."
For the first time, regret showed through his composure. It vanished quickly, but I had seen it. This was not a stranger amusing himself with my grief. Whatever tied him to my father had cost him something too.
I looked past him toward the cemetery road. Still no headlights. Julian was not coming.
"Say I believe you knew my father," I said. "That does not explain why you stitched me up three nights ago, why you came here today, or why you have been waiting in the rain with a sealed folder."
"No," Sebastian said. "The folder explains that."
He ignored the ruined camellias, the open grave, and the casket below. His gaze stayed on my face.
"What do you want?" I demanded.
"I want to give you what belongs to you," he said.
He shifted his stance. In his left hand, clamped tightly against his side, he held a thick manila folder. A heavy circle of red wax sealed the flap, keeping the contents perfectly dry against the storm.
"What is that?" I asked.
"The reason your father told me to find you."
My gaze dropped to the red wax. Stamped directly into the center of the seal was the Vance family crest, my late father's private insignia.
Sebastian stopped two feet away from me, raising the folder into the gray light.
