Chapter 1 — Thirty Calls

“Stop calling me.

I’m closing the biggest deal of my entire career.”

My husband’s voice came through the phone thin and irritated, and I sat alone in our living room in head-to-toe black and listened, past his words, to what was behind them.

It was not the sound of a corporate office.

There were no keyboards, no colleagues murmuring strategy, none of the busy hum a man closing a career-defining deal would be surrounded by.

What I heard behind Julian’s voice was the crash of ocean waves.

And then, unmistakably, the soft, playful giggle of a young woman.

I looked down at the screen of my phone.

Thirty calls.

Thirty unanswered calls, over the last two days, stacked in a column like a monument to something.

A few feet from where I sat, resting on a small table I had draped in white lilies, was a polished wooden urn.

Inside it were the ashes of my mother-in-law, Evelyn.

I had chosen the urn myself, two days before, in a funeral home, alone.

And Julian — my husband of twenty years, closing the biggest deal of his career with the ocean at his back and a young woman laughing beside him — had no idea that his mother was dead.

Chapter 2 — The Ring on the Folder

He did not know she was dead.

He did not know that I had spent the previous forty-eight hours organizing her funeral, entirely by myself — the hospital paperwork, the funeral home, the memorial, the cremation, the calls to relatives.