I stood beside two coffins while my parents relaxed on a tropical beach with my brother, calling my husband and daughter’s funeral “too trivial” to interrupt their vacation for. A few days later, they appeared at my front door demanding $40,000. My mother looked me straight in the face and said, “After everything we’ve done for you, you owe us.”

My mother sent the beach photograph while I was standing between my husband’s coffin and my daughter’s.

Samuel wore the charcoal suit we had bought for our anniversary dinner. Six-year-old Penelope lay beside him in the pale blue dress she had chosen for her kindergarten graduation. The funeral director had arranged white roses around both coffins, but I could still smell the hospital soap beneath them.

My phone vibrated against my seven-month-pregnant belly.

Evelyn, Harold, and my brother Marcus stood barefoot on a beach in Nassau, holding tropical drinks. My mother’s message appeared beneath their sunburned smiles.

Flights are expensive, sweetheart. Funerals are emotionally exhausting. We can’t ruin the whole trip over something this trivial.

I read the word twice.

Trivial.

Samuel and Penelope had died four nights earlier when the silver SUV they were driving left the Courtney Campbell Causeway during heavy rain. Samuel had borrowed the vehicle from Marcus’s used-car dealership while our own car was being serviced.

My parents owned part of the dealership. Marcus ran it.

None of them had called me after the crash for longer than three minutes.

A woman from the funeral home touched my elbow. “Mrs. Carter, someone left this for you at the front desk.”

She handed me a certified envelope from Gulf Atlantic Insurance.

The company was reviewing competing claims arising from the accident. One had been submitted by me as Samuel’s surviving spouse.

The other had been submitted before the bodies were released from the medical examiner.

Claimants: Evelyn Whitmore, Harold Whitmore, and Marcus Whitmore, doing business as Bay Point Motors.

They described themselves as the owners and lienholders of the SUV. The claim stated that Samuel owed the dealership $40,000 under a private purchase agreement.

I had never seen such an agreement.

Neither had Samuel’s attorney.

At the bottom of the notice, the insurer requested all records showing who owned the vehicle and whether Samuel had been warned about prior structural damage.

Structural damage.

The police had told me the crash appeared weather-related.

I looked across the room at Penelope’s yellow raincoat folded beside her coffin. Samuel had taken her out that evening because she wanted grilled cheese from a diner in Clearwater.

They should have been gone forty minutes.

Instead, my family filed a financial claim before I had chosen their burial clothes.

I called Marcus.

He rejected the first two calls. On the third, music and ocean wind filled the line.

“What structural damage?” I asked.

There was a pause.

Then my mother took the phone.

“Jane, this isn’t the time.”

“I’m standing beside two coffins.”

“And we’re trying to protect the family business.”

“From what?”