The clay was still wet on the toes of my boots—a heavy, suffocating grey mud that clung to the leather like a stubborn memory of the earth. I sat in my car, staring blankly at the iron gates of Oakwood Memorial Park.
Two hours had passed since I watched the mahogany casket containing my twenty-six-year-old daughter, Emily, descend into the ground. She was supposed to be picking out crib sheets, not a burial plot. She had been eight months pregnant when her life was snuffed out by what the doctors called a catastrophic complication of eclampsia.
My husband, Richard, and our son-in-law, Mark Wilson, had left earlier in a black limousine. They had urged me to join the wake at Mark’s expansive estate, to drink expensive whiskey and trade polite, empty platitudes with strangers. I couldn’t do it. I needed the silence of the cemetery to match the silence that had taken up residence in my chest.
My phone, a dark monolith on the passenger seat, suddenly vibrated. The name on the screen made my heart skip: Dr. Reynolds. He was the attending physician who had signed the initial paperwork before the “transfer.”
“Hello?” my voice was a ruined rasp.
“Mrs. Carter,” Reynolds whispered, his voice jagged with a fear that transcended the cellular connection. “Where are you?”
“I’m at the cemetery,” I replied.
“Don’t go home,” he urged. “Come to the back entrance of my office. Now. And Margaret—do not tell anyone. Especially not your son-in-law.”
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