Chapter 1

My husband gave the grave I had bought beside my mother to his stepmother while my hand was still on my mother’s coffin. He did it before my family, her neighbours, and every person who knew I had chosen that place so I would one day lie beside her. The shoes I had bought for that burial were already boxed at home. The oval brass plaque bearing my name had stood in the grass since my mother became too sick to visit.

Two workers cut into the earth beside her open grave. Their spades lifted the first squares of wet sod while the straps beneath her coffin creaked against my grip.

“Stop,” my husband said. “You’re opening the wrong plot.”

The workers froze. One kept his boot on the spade.

I held the coffin steady. “That is my plot.”

Daniel took a folded paper from inside his coat. He did not look at me when he opened it for the cemetery supervisor.

“The plot beside Evelyn belongs to Celeste Rowan,” he said. “The transfer was completed three weeks ago.”

Rain gathered on the paper. I took it from his hand before the supervisor could reach for it. Daniel’s signature filled the bottom line. Victor Rowan’s name appeared beneath it as the broker.

“You signed away my grave during my mother’s last week alive.”

“Mara, lower your voice.” Daniel reached for the paper, but I folded it against the coffin. “This is still your mother’s burial.”

“You brought Celeste here to watch you take the place beside her.”

Celeste stood beneath a black umbrella near the mound of fresh earth. Her coat was dry. Mine clung to my shoulders. She looked at the adjoining plot, not at my mother.

Daniel held out his hand. “Give me the transfer.”

I slid the paper under the coffin cloth and pinned it there with my wrist. “Tell them whose money bought that ground.”

“This is not the time.”

“You chose the time.” I pulled the coffin strap toward me until the buckle struck the wood. “You waited until my mother could not hear you and I could not leave her.”

A murmur moved through the mourners. June came away from the row of chairs with Evelyn’s old ledger held against her ribs.

“That plot was paid from Evelyn’s account,” she said. She opened the ledger to a marked page. “I wrote the check myself.”

Daniel glanced at the page, then at Victor. Victor rubbed a streak of rain from his sleeve and said nothing.

Celeste tilted her umbrella away from the wind. “Daniel told me it had been settled.”

“No,” I said. “He told you I would be forced to accept it.”

The supervisor crouched beside the oval brass plaque. He worked a tool beneath its edge, exposing the clean strip of metal that had been protected by the frame.

“Please don’t remove that,” I said. I left the coffin and stepped onto the adjoining earth. “My mother watched me put it there.”

Daniel caught the supervisor’s eye. “Continue.”

I hooked two fingers beneath the plaque before the worker could lift it. The metal cut cold across my skin.

The supervisor read the engraving. “MARA HALE.”

“That is my name,” I said. “Leave it where my mother saw it.”

A worker brought another brass plate from the equipment cart. CELESTE ROWAN had been cut into its face in deep black letters. He laid it over mine, lined up the holes, and drove the first bolt through both plates.

The drill screamed across the graves. I caught the second bolt before it rolled into the mud and closed my fist around it.

Daniel pointed toward the workers, making sure every mourner heard him.

“My wife no longer has any claim to this grave.”