I stood at the chapel entrance clutching a wreath of white roses, my hands trembling not from the cold November air but from the weight of six months of guilt pressing against my chest. I hadn’t spoken to my mother in half a year—not a fight exactly, just a drifting silence that had calcified until neither of us knew how to break it. Now she was gone, and I’d never get another chance.
The call had come from a hospital administrator, not my family. “Denise Marlo, cardiac arrest, pronounced dead at 9:00 a.m.” The words felt too clinical, too small to contain the magnitude of losing your mother.
I’m Kinsley Roberts, thirty-eight years old, a senior forensic auditor for Harborgate Forensics in Richmond, Virginia. My job is finding the invisible bleed of money people think they’ve scrubbed clean—following the three-dollar coffee charge that brings down a CEO’s empire, tracking the hesitation in a handwritten signature, reading the silence where numbers should speak. I’m trained to spot anomalies instantly, to see patterns others miss.
But standing at that chapel door, I wasn’t an auditor. I was just a daughter who’d waited too long to call her mother back.
I reached for the heavy oak door handle, but it swung open from inside before I could turn it. Graham Kesler—my mother’s second husband—stepped out, flanked by his children Belle and Trent. They formed a wall of expensive black wool and barely concealed hostility.
Graham looked at me with dry, hard eyes. He didn’t look like a grieving widower. He looked like a bouncer at an exclusive club where my name wasn’t on the list.
“Kinsley,” he said flatly. “You shouldn’t be here.”
The words took a moment to process through the fog of grief. “What are you talking about? She’s my mother. Move.”
“She was your mother,” Belle corrected, her voice dripping with false sympathy. “But you lost that right months ago. You abandoned her.”
“I didn’t abandon anyone,” I said, heat climbing my neck. “We were both busy. Life happens. I’m here now. Let me in.”
Graham stepped closer, invading my space. He smelled of scotch and peppermint. “Denise gave specific instructions. She was heartbroken by your silence. She told us clearly that if anything happened to her, she didn’t want you parading your guilt at her funeral.”
The story doesn’t end here –
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