I sat down at the long table at the front of the hall, the one reserved for family. Ethan sat down next to me with a plate of ham sandwiches.
Marjorie sat on my other side. Ethan’s younger brother, Dean, sat across from us, staring at a cup of coffee he wasn’t drinking.
People kept coming up to the table. Shaking my hand. Telling me stories about my father.
Ethan smiled at every single one of them. He thanked them for coming. He said things like, “George was like a father to me, too.” He was very good at it.
Then, in a gap between visitors, his hand came under the table and closed around my wrist.
Not gently.
His fingers clamped down hard enough that I felt the bones in my wrist press together.
“Whatever comes to you comes to us,” he murmured. Still smiling. Still looking out at the room. “You understand that, right? We’re married. We’re a team.”
I looked down at the hand on my wrist.
Then I felt Marjorie lean in from my other side. Her perfume came with her, a heavy cloud of roses.
“Lydia, dear,” she said softly. “You’ve been through so much. Let Ethan handle the financial matters until you’re feeling more like yourself. There’s no shame in it. That’s what husbands are for.”
I sat there between the two of them.
I looked at Ethan’s hand, wrapped around my wrist under the paper tablecloth.
I looked at the pearl earrings on his mother’s ears.
And I thought about my father, three years earlier, standing at his kitchen sink with his sleeves rolled up and his hands in the dishwater, saying four words I’d laughed at.
He looks at the walls.
I pulled my wrist free.
I folded my napkin into a neat square and set it on my plate.
“The will reading is tomorrow at ten,” I said. “At Martin Shaw’s office. I’ll be there.”
Ethan smiled at me. A warm, relieved, satisfied smile.
He thought I’d surrendered.
That was his first mistake.
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.