My husband threw me off a mountain for a $50 million payout and reported me dead before rescuers even arrived—so when they found me alive, I begged them not to tell him and let him plan my funeral instead

Chapter 6

Three days after Miles was born, Derek Marsh held a memorial service.

There was still no body — weather had suspended the recovery, which meant my husband had the strange luxury of burying a wife who hadn’t been found yet, in a fine chapel, on livestream, for the family who couldn’t attend. My mother received the invitation by email. She showed it to Holly first, then to me.

My wedding photo stood on the front of the program. My head on his shoulder. His hand around my waist. Below it, in clean letters:

ELENA MARSH BELOVED WIFE, DAUGHTER, AND MOTHER-TO-BE

Mother-to-be. I looked across the still-dark room at my sleeping son. Derek had already turned our baby into a memory. He’d written the words “mother-to-be” about a woman who was a mother, a woman nursing a six-pound son down the hall from the empty bassinet he’d dedicated.

“I don’t want to see any more,” I said.

Mom nodded. She didn’t argue. She closed her laptop on the condolence thread, and her face stayed carefully empty, which meant the grief was enormous behind it.

That night, after everyone was asleep, I opened the laptop myself.

I watched seven minutes of the livestream. That was all I could take.

Derek stood at the front of the small chapel in the charcoal suit I’d bought him for our tenth anniversary. I recognized the cut of the shoulders, the way the jacket fell. He looked awful — hollowed out, grey around the mouth, the way real grief carves a person. His voice broke twice. People filed past him afterward, and I watched them embrace this performance, this man who had scrubbed the snow off his boots and logged the location of my panic attack.

Some of the grief was probably even real, which was the worst part. He’d loved me, once. He’d loved the idea of what we were building, once. He’d loved me the way you love a good meal — with appetite, until something better was on the menu.

Then Vanessa Voss approached him.

She stood beside him at the window of the chapel. Not touching. Not yet. But close enough that the space between them had a shape to it, a practiced geometry, the way two people stand who have tested that distance a hundred times in private.

Something inside me went very still.

I closed the video. I lay down with Miles on my chest and stared at the ceiling, and I let myself feel the cold scope of it: he had planned my funeral before he pushed me. He had chosen the chapel, written the program, practiced the voice cracks. He had stood in front of a livestream camera in a suit I’d bought him, comforting his grieving mother-in-law, an arm around the woman he’d betrayed me with, waiting for the insurance company to cut a check.

I fell asleep to the sound of Miles breathing, and I dreamed of the ledge.

The next morning, Holly came in with a photocopy, and the look on her face made me sit up before she could speak.

“Your husband called Sterling Life this morning,” she said. “He filed a preliminary claim on your policy.”

“Already? There’s no death certificate. There’s no body.”

“He wants one,” Holly said carefully. “He didn’t ask about a death certificate. He asked how fast they can pay out once the county issues one, and he asked it in front of a broker who found it odd enough to call us.”

“Once.” I repeated the word like a wound. “Once the county issues one.”

Holly nodded. “He’s not asking whether you’re dead, Elena. He’s asking how quickly you can be.”

I looked across the room at the bassinet, at the small rise and fall of Miles’s chest, and for the first time since the mountain, I let myself feel how close we’d come.

One mile of air.

One hour of cold.

One signature.

That close.