My mother sucked in a breath so sharp I heard it over the organ. “Is he serious right now?” she whispered, her fingers digging into my hand.
“That’s Vanessa,” I muttered. I’d seen the name light up Layla’s phone two months earlier, the night my sister showed me the texts with her hands shaking. “The coworker.”
Heads turned. A ripple of whispers moved through the pews like wind through a wheat field. Terrence walked Vanessa Cole straight to the front row — Layla’s row — and let her rest her head on his shoulder like she was the one who’d lost a wife.
I half-rose out of my seat. My father’s hand clamped down on my forearm before I could take a single step. “Not here, Mika,” he said under his breath. “Not during the service.”
The pastor spoke of Layla’s laugh, her stubbornness, the baby boy she’d already named Elijah. I couldn’t stop staring at the back of Terrence’s head, trying to understand how a man could bring his mistress to his pregnant wife’s funeral three weeks after she and their son died in his own home.
Then, just as the final hymn ended and people began to rise, a man in a gray suit stepped up to the front, a leather folio tucked under one arm.
“Excuse me,” he said, and his voice carried clean through the church. “My name is Curtis Whitlow. I’m the attorney who handled Layla Boone’s estate.”
Terrence’s head snapped up. “Now? You’re doing this now?”
Mr. Whitlow didn’t blink. “Your wife left very specific instructions,” he said. “Her will is to be read today, in front of her family. And in front of you.”
He opened the folio.
“There’s a section,” he continued, “that Layla asked to be read aloud, at her funeral, in this exact room.”
I need to back up, because none of what happened that day made sense without what came before it.
Layla was thirty-two, two years younger than me, and the kind of person who mothered everyone around her long before she had a child of her own. She married Terrence six years earlier, right after he finished his contractor’s license, back when Piney Ridge still felt like a town where nothing bad ever really happened.
They’d been trying for a baby for three years when she finally got pregnant. I remember her calling me, crying happy tears into the phone, saying she was finally going to get everything she’d wanted.
