His Mistress Wore White to Our Daughter's Funeral · Ava Sterling

Chapter 1: The Second Car

The rain started twenty minutes before they lowered my daughter into the ground.

I stood at the edge of the grave holding a spray of white roses I had tied myself at four that morning, because nobody else in the Ashford family had remembered to order flowers.

Six years old. That was the entire sentence. Six years old, a heart that had been wrong since the first ultrasound, and an operating room in Zurich that was booked, paid for, and never used.

"Mrs. Ashford." The funeral director touched my elbow. "We can begin whenever you're ready."

"We'll wait," I said. "Her father isn't here yet."

His eyes moved past my shoulder to the gravel drive, and something in his face folded shut.

Two cars had come through the cemetery gates.

The first was Julian's — black, long, familiar. I had ridden in it to three hospitals in eleven months.

The second one I didn't know.

Julian got out into the rain and did not look at me. He never looked at me anymore. He looked at the grave the way he looked at a quarterly report that had come in under projection.

Then the door of the second car opened, and a driver went around with an umbrella, and my stepsister stepped out onto the wet grass in a cream silk dress.

Camille.

Cream. At a child's funeral. Cut so close under the bust that there was no mistaking what she was carrying.

Five months, maybe six. She had one hand resting on it the whole way across the lawn, the way women do when they want to be sure you've seen.

"Nora." Julian's mother arrived at my shoulder before I could move. Vivian Ashford, sixty-two years old, black Chanel, a face like a closed bank. "Don't make a scene. There are photographers at the fence."

"He brought her."

"He brought the mother of his son." Vivian said it the way you'd read out a weather report. "To a family occasion. Try to remember there's a camera."

Camille reached us. Her eyes were pink. She had cried in the car — she always could, on command, since we were nine years old and she wanted my bedroom.

"Nora." She reached for my hands. I let her take them, because my body had stopped taking instructions somewhere around the third hour of the wake. "I'm so sorry. I loved her too. I couldn't let Julian do this alone."

"You're wearing white," I said.

"It's ivory." She blinked at me, hurt. "You're not going to do this today. Not at her grave."

Julian finally spoke. "Nora. Stand on the other side."

"What?"

"On the other side of the grave." He didn't raise his voice. He never had to. "The photographs will run in the morning editions. I would rather the family looked composed."

The family. The four of us, arranged around a hole in the ground the size of a child's bed, and I was the one being asked to move.

I went. That is the part I still can't explain to anyone. I went, and I stood where he pointed, with the rain coming through my coat, and I watched my husband hold an umbrella over another woman while my daughter was lowered past my knees.

The priest said something about a shepherd and a small lamb. Camille cried prettily. Vivian's hand went once, lightly, to Camille's stomach, and she said — not quietly, not quietly at all — "At least one of them will be finished properly."

Something in me came loose then.

"Say that again," I said.

"Nora." Julian's hand closed on my wrist. Not hard. Just enough. "You are embarrassing yourself."

"She's in that box, Julian." My voice cracked and carried and I didn't care. "Look at it. Look at it once."

He looked at his watch.

Twenty-eight years old and I understood, standing in the rain at my daughter's grave, that my husband had already finished this. That for him it had been over for months, and today was a scheduling conflict.

The first handful of earth went down.

I didn't hear the rest.

* * *

They were folding the chairs when a man in a grey raincoat came down the path with a leather folder.

Marcus Hale. Julian's lawyer since Yale. He'd been at our wedding. He'd sent Lily a rocking horse when she was born, and it stood in the corner of her room for six years and she never once got well enough to ride it.

"Nora." He held out an envelope. "I apologize for the timing. Julian asked me to hand this to you directly."

"What is it?"

"A petition for dissolution of marriage. There's also a notice regarding the residence."

The rain had gone right through the paper before I got it open. Petitioner: Julian Wells Ashford. Respondent: Nora Ashford. Grounds. Terms. A schedule of separate property four pages long.

And at the bottom, above his signature, a date.

March the third.

I read it three times before it went in. March third. Not this week. Not after. Three weeks and two days ago — while Lily was still in the pediatric cardiac ICU on the eighth floor of Mercy General, with a tube in her throat and my hand in hers, and I was sleeping in a plastic chair and telling her about Zurich. About the doctors there. About the snow.

He had signed this while she was still alive.

"You filed," I said, "while she was still breathing."

Marcus had the decency to look at the grass. "I filed when it became inevitable."

"When what became inevitable?"

Julian's voice came from behind me, flat and reasonable and utterly calm.

"All of it," he said. "Everyone standing at this grave knew it was inevitable, Nora. You were the only one still pretending."

Then he walked back to the car, and held the door for Camille, and they drove out through the gates while the workmen were still filling in the ground.

* * *

I stayed until the machines were done. Somebody had to.

The cemetery had gone the colour of dishwater by the time I turned toward the road, and that was when I saw a woman standing under the yew tree by the wall, out of the way, with her hood up.

She came forward when I got close. I knew the face before I placed it — a small, tired, kind face I had seen at two in the morning more times than I had seen my own mother's.

Deborah Kim. Lily's night nurse on Eight.

"Mrs. Ashford." Her voice was very low. "I only have a minute. I parked outside the gate so nobody would see the car."

"Deborah—"

"Please just listen, because if anyone finds out I did this I lose my license and I have two kids." She pushed something into my hand. Paper, folded small, warm from her pocket. "The Zurich transfer. The one for the surgery."

"It was declined," I said. "The bank declined it. Julian said there was an issue with the foreign account, he said he was fixing it—"

"The bank didn't decline it." She was already backing away, her eyes going past me to the road. "It cleared, Mrs. Ashford. The money reached the clinic. Somebody sent it back."

"What?"

"It was returned by the payer's own office. There's a name and a date on the reversal and I have looked at it every night for three weeks and I couldn't take it into that hospital one more shift." She stopped. Her mouth trembled. "I'm sorry. She was such a good girl. She asked me if snow was cold."

Then she was gone through the gate, and I was alone in the rain with a folded sheet of paper in my fist.

I opened it.

A wire confirmation. A reversal instruction. An authorizing signature I had seen on twelve thousand documents in nine years of marriage.

And a date, printed in small grey type at the top of the page.

March the third.

The same date on the divorce petition still in my other hand.