For Six Months After I Buried My Husband and Both My Children, My Family Sent Cheerful Group-Chat Messages and a Party Invitation as if Nothing Had Happened — Then My Name Hit the News Attached to $18.7 Million, and Suddenly Every One of Them Remembered My Number

I looked out once, during the service, at the pews on my side of the church — my family’s side.

And they were empty.

Chapter 4 — Only Aunt Ruth

Not entirely empty.

There was one person.

My Aunt Ruth had driven six hours through the night to be there, and she had learned about the accident not from anyone in my family but from a neighbor of hers who’d seen it on the news — because not one of my parents, and not my sister, had thought to pick up a phone and tell her.

She sat alone in that long empty pew, this one aunt, in a dark coat she’d clearly pulled from the back of a closet, and she was the entire representation of my blood family at the funeral of my husband and my two children.