My son sat there grinning like he’d just won the lottery while the lawyer read my ex-wife’s twenty-eight-million-dollar will. He looked at me with pity. “You won’t get a single cent, Dad,” he whispered, loud enough for everyone to hear.
“Not a dime.
Go back to your rented place.” But he had no idea who was really in control. Then the lawyer read one more line, and his smile disappeared.
The rain at the cemetery was cold, but not as cold as the look my son Brandon gave me when I tried to approach the casket. The cemetery sat on a hill outside Seattle, overlooking gray water and darker clouds.
Catherine always loved that view.
He stepped in front of me, blocking my path to the front row. “The front row is for family, Thomas,” he said. He didn’t call me Dad.
He hadn’t called me Dad in five years—not since he decided that a retired engineer living in a small Portland apartment wasn’t good enough for his image as a rising marketing executive with a leased luxury car and a condo he could barely afford.
He pointed a gloved hand toward the back of the gathered mourners, past the business partners in tailored coats, past the distant cousins, past the people who only knew Catherine for her money. “You can stand back there by the gate,” Brandon said.
“Try not to embarrass us. Tiffany is livestreaming this for her followers.”
I looked at Tiffany, my daughter-in-law.
She was standing by the grave, holding a black lace umbrella in one hand and her phone in the other.
She was angling her face toward the light, chin tilted just so, actually posing next to my ex-wife’s open grave, checking her angles and making sure her waterproof mascara looked perfectly tragic for the thousands watching on her channel. I didn’t argue. I didn’t make a scene.
I just nodded and walked to the back, under the wide branches of an old oak tree, watching them bury the woman I had loved for forty years.
Catherine and I had divorced ten years ago, but it wasn’t because we stopped loving each other. It was business.
A strategic move to protect her assets from a lawsuit that threatened to sink her real estate empire up and down the West Coast. We stayed divorced on paper because it was safer.
We lived apart because it kept up appearances.
But every Sunday, she drove across town in a modest SUV and came to my small apartment for coffee. Every major decision she made, she ran by me first. Brandon didn’t know that.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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