He died early Thursday morning. The rain hadn’t stopped.
On the morning of the funeral, the house was dead silent. I woke up to an empty, king-sized bed. The closet doors were left open, a graveyard of discarded velvet hangers. I reached for my phone on the nightstand, expecting a text asking how I was holding up. Instead, there was an automated notification from my bank: $50,000 had been withdrawn from our joint savings account at 4:00 AM, flagged under “Travel & Resort Expenses.”
I dressed in my dark suit alone. I drove to the small stone church alone. The pews were empty, save for a few of my father’s old teaching colleagues in the back. Miranda’s entire family—the Vance family, a parasitic clan who had lived off my credit cards, my second cars, and my hospitality for the better part of a decade—was nowhere to be found.
As the priest stepped up to the pulpit and cleared his throat to begin the service, my phone buzzed violently in my breast pocket. A flicker of naive hope told me it was an apology. I slipped it out and looked at the screen.
It was a photo sent to our family group chat from Miranda’s brother, Leo. He was leaning back in the plush leather seat of a private jet, holding up a $500 bottle of Armand de Brignac champagne. The caption beneath it read: Finally, some peace and quiet. See you in a week, ‘Brother’!
The text message that snapped the final, fraying thread of my sanity arrived just as the first heavy, wet clump of dirt hit the polished oak of my father’s casket.
