I never expected to bury my child. It is the most unnatural posture on earth—to stand while they lower your boy beneath it. Richard was thirty‑eight.
I was sixty‑two.
April rain threaded through the oaks at Green‑Wood Cemetery and slicked the marble angels until they looked like they were weeping with us. Sound came thin and far away: shovel on wet soil, a zipper of thunder somewhere over the harbor, the soft human noises people make when they don’t know what to do with their hands.
Grief walled me off. Faces blurred at the edges until only the polished mahogany, the raw mouth of earth, and my own name spoken in softened tones remained.
Across the grave stood my daughter‑in‑law.
Amanda—precision hair, liner that wouldn’t dare smudge, posture like a trademark. Married three years and somehow the gravitational center. Her black Chanel looked like a dress made for sponsorship dinners, not for the edge of a grave.
She accepted condolences with a professional tilt of the head.
When our eyes met, she arranged a sympathetic smile that never touched anything living. “Mrs.
Thompson?” A man in a gray suit waited until the last handful of soil hit wood. “Jeffrey Palmer.
Palmer, Woodson & Hayes.
Richard’s attorney. The reading will be at the penthouse in an hour. Your presence is requested.”
“At the house?” The words sounded like they belonged to the rain.
“That’s… soon.”
“Amanda—Mrs.
Conrad‑Thompson—was insistent.” He corrected himself with the reflex of a man who knows where the center of the room is now. Of course she was.
Amanda loved theater almost as much as she loved the audience for it. Richard had believed himself happy with her, and after cancer took his father five years earlier, I had learned to let happiness sit where it landed.
But there had always been math in her eyes—columns and totals hidden under the glow.
The Fifth Avenue penthouse sailed over Central Park like a glass ship. Richard bought it before her; she remade it after. Books banished.
Angles everywhere.
Seating that punished the idea of sinking in. Fashion friends, board members, glossy strangers drifted through as if this were a launch party instead of a wake.
“Eleanor, darling.” Amanda offered an air‑kiss that landed safely a breath from my cheek. “So glad you could make it.”
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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