On me.
He understood, in that instant, exactly who had done this.
The woman he’d let grieve him. The woman whose real tears sold his fake death. The woman he’d been so sure was too heartbroken and too far beneath his new life to ever be standing in the corner of his second wedding, holding a phone full of photographs.
“Meredith,” he said. Just my name. All the color gone from his face.
“Hi, Adrian,” I said, calm as still water. “You look good. For a dead man.
I did the flowers. They came out nice, didn’t they?
I also called your insurance company. And the police. And my lawyer. Because it turns out that when you fake your death on a policy with my name on it, and let me cry at your funeral to make it look real, you don’t just break my heart.
You make me an accessory to your fraud.
And I don’t do time for a coward, Adrian.
So I documented everything, and I reported it the second I knew, and now the only person going down for this is the one who faked his own funeral to marry up.
Enjoy your wedding.
It’s the last party you’re going to for a while.”
The investigators reached him then.
I picked up my flower boxes and I walked out, past Colleen, who couldn’t look at me, past the stunned bride, past the wreckage of the second life Adrian had built on my grief.
I didn’t look back.
I’d already cried all my tears at his first funeral.
PART 5 — FINAL
Adrian was arrested that day, at his own wedding, for insurance fraud and a list of related charges that grew as the investigation did. Faking your death is a remarkably criminal thing to do; it touches fraud, forgery, conspiracy, and — because Colleen had signed documents and lied to officials — she was charged too. The mother who wept at her living son’s grave faced her own reckoning for it.
