Chapter 1 - The Graves Waiting for Us
Evelyn stopped walking so suddenly that George nearly ran into her.
Two fresh granite headstones stood beneath the late-afternoon light at Maple Ridge Cemetery outside Columbus, Ohio.
GEORGE WHITMORE.
EVELYN WHITMORE.
Their birth years were carved underneath.
The spaces for death dates were blank.
Evelyn stared at her own name.
“What the hell is this?”
Behind them, Dylan stepped forward and slammed a stack of papers against his father’s chest.
“We bought your graves. Now sign over the house.”
George caught the papers before they fell.
The top sheet carried the name of an assisted-living facility.
Lauren stood beside her brother, camel coat buttoned neatly, blonde bob unmoving in the breeze.
She looked at Evelyn’s headstone and smirked.
“You won’t need either for long.”
Something broke across George’s face.
He grabbed Dylan by the front of his black jacket and drove him backward against a stone bench.
THUD.
Then his palm cracked across Dylan’s cheek.
“You buried us while we’re still alive?!”
Dylan stumbled against the bench, stunned more by the humiliation than the pain.
Lauren stepped backward.
Evelyn didn’t move toward either child.
Her attention had shifted to two more stones nearby.
Both were covered with gray protective cloths.
She pulled the first cover aside.
DYLAN WHITMORE.
Her son went pale.
Evelyn uncovered the second.
LAUREN WHITMORE.
Lauren’s smirk vanished.
Both headstones had blank death dates too.
Evelyn slowly turned.
“Funny... your graves are ready too—and we didn’t buy them.”
For several seconds, nobody spoke.
Dylan stared at his name.
Lauren looked from the stone to George.
George said nothing.
That silence registered somewhere in Evelyn’s mind, but the shock of the moment was too large for her to understand it.
She looked down at the papers Dylan had pressed against his father.
Assisted-living admission forms.
Financial disclosure sheets.
A property valuation.
And underneath them, a deed transferring George and Evelyn’s paid-off house into something called Whitmore Family Property LLC.
Evelyn lifted her eyes.
“You came here expecting us to sign this?”
Lauren recovered first.
“You’re seventy and sixty-seven. We’re trying to plan before something happens.”
George held up the papers.
“Something already happened.”
His voice was low.
“Our children decided we were dead before we were inconvenient enough to actually die.”
Then Evelyn noticed the date printed beside the LLC.
May you like
It had been created eleven days earlier.
And neither she nor George had ever heard of it.
