After my husband’s funeral, I returned home with my black dress still clinging to my skin. I opened the door… and found my mother-in-law and eight family members packing suitcases as if it were a hotel.

Marjorie’s expression hardened. “Have you lost your mind?”

I brushed beneath one eye and finally looked at her properly.

“No,” I said. “You’ve all just made the same mistake with Bradley that you’ve made for thirty-eight years. You assumed that because he was quiet, he was weak. Because he was private, he was broke. Because he never staged his life for your approval, he must not have built one.”

Declan straightened from the suitcase. He was Bradley’s cousin from his father’s side, always smelling faintly of cologne and borrowed money.

“There’s no will,” he said. “We already checked.”

“Of course you did,” I replied. “And of course you didn’t find one.”

What none of them knew was that six days earlier, beneath fluorescent hospital light and the endless hiss of oxygen, Bradley had predicted this almost word for word.

If they come before the flowers die, he had whispered, laugh first. Elena will handle the rest.

He had been so pale then. Pale in that frightening way that makes a person look almost lit from within, as though their body has become too fragile to fully contain them. Rain streaked down the hospital window behind him in thin silver lines. The monitors blinked steadily. He squeezed my hand with what little strength he still had and made me repeat every instruction back to him.