I’m glad to have you here. Follow my story until the end and comment the city you’re watching from so I can see how far my story has reached. The funeral flowers were still fresh when they decided to destroy me.
I sat in Floyd’s leather chair in his home office, the same chair where he’d spent countless evenings reviewing business documents, checking emails from clients up and down the West Coast, and planning our future together. Twenty-two years of marriage, and now I was supposed to pretend that the two men standing in front of me had any right to decide my fate. Sydney, Floyd’s eldest son, wore his father’s death like an expensive suit, perfectly tailored to his advantage.
At forty-five, he possessed the same commanding presence Floyd once had, but none of the warmth. His steel-gray eyes swept over me with the cold calculation of a man evaluating a bad investment. “Colleen,” he said, his voice carrying that patronizing tone I’d grown to hate over the years.
“We need to discuss some practical matters.”
Edwin, three years younger but somehow looking older with his prematurely thinning hair and soft jaw, stood beside his brother like a loyal lieutenant. Where Sydney was sharp edges and calculated moves, Edwin was passive aggression wrapped in false concern. “We know this is difficult,” Edwin added, his voice dripping with synthetic sympathy.
“Losing Dad so suddenly, it’s been hard on all of us.”
Hard on all of us. As if they’d been the ones holding Floyd’s hand through those long nights at Mercy General Hospital. As if they’d been the ones learning the names of every nurse on the oncology floor, trying to read the expressions on their faces when they thought I wasn’t looking.
They’d shown up for the funeral, of course. Sydney flying in from his law practice in San Francisco, his carry-on still bearing the airline tag. Edwin driving up from Los Angeles, where he ran some vague “consulting business” that never seemed to have actual clients.
But during the three months of Floyd’s illness, when it really mattered, I had been alone. “What kind of practical matters?” I asked, though something cold was already settling in my stomach. Sydney exchanged a look with Edwin, a silent communication perfected over decades of shared secrets and mutual understanding.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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