“What the hell!”
Nora’s voice cracked across the cemetery parking lot like a gunshot.
A few people standing by their cars turned around to look. An older man in a black suit stopped with his hand on his car door.
I was standing next to my car with a small cardboard box open in my hands. Nora, my dead patient’s older sister, was leaning over my shoulder, staring down at the paper on top.
Her face had gone bright red.
“She left you Grandma’s money?”
She jabbed her finger at the lawyer’s letter in the box. Her voice had gone sharp and high.
“I didn’t know,” I said. “I swear to you, Nora. I had no idea.”
“Then why did you marry her?”
“It wasn’t romantic. You knew that. You were there.”
“I did know that.” Her voice broke right in half. “And now I can see exactly what you got out of it.”
She pressed one hand over her mouth.
“No,” I said. “I promise you. It’s not like that. It’s not like that at all.”
Nora backed away from me. Two steps. Three. She pointed at me with a shaking finger.
“I’m reporting you to the hospital.”
And she turned around and walked away across the gravel, her black dress whipping around her knees in the wind.
I stood there beside my car with the box open in my hands.
If the hospital believed I’d married a dying patient for her money, I would lose my job. My license, maybe. Everything I’d spent twelve years building.
I wanted to run after Nora.
I also wanted to read that number on the lawyer’s letter one more time.
I put the lid back on the box before I could do either.
Adrian Hawthorne is a celebrated author and dedicated archivist who finds inspiration in the hidden stories of the past. Educated at Oxford, he now works at the National Archives, where preserving history fuels his evocative writing. Balancing archival precision with creative storytelling, Adrian founded the Hawthorne Institute of Literary Arts to mentor emerging writers and honor the timeless art of narrative.