Chapter 1 - THE HASTY GOODBYE
My name is Samantha. I am thirty-six years old, and until that freezing morning, I believed I was living a quiet, blessed life in San Diego with Christopher, my husband of nearly nine years.
I awoke into pitch-black confinement, surrounded by the cloying, suffocating smell of stale lilies. My limbs were leaden weights, my chest barely rising, paralyzed by whatever had slipped into my dinner the night before. Pamela, my closest friend, had come by our house claiming she had work documents to drop off. Christopher had handed me a glass of wine. When my knees buckled shortly after, Christopher had held me, murmuring that something I ate must have upset my stomach.
Now, trapped beneath bolted pine, the horrifying reality set in: they believed I was a corpse, and I was being laid into the earth.
I heard the gravel crunch above me. Two familiar voices filtered through the wood. Christopher and Pamela. I prayed for a fraction of a second that they had realized a mistake, that they were here to save me. Then Pamela’s cold laugh shattered my world: “Finally. Once they bury her, we can stop pretending.” Christopher replied without hesitation: “And we can enjoy what her father left her. I put up with too many years for this.” My father had left me vast properties and a coastal estate in La Jolla in my sole name. Christopher had spent a decade claiming wealth never mattered to him.
When the elderly caretaker asked if family was arriving or if they wished to open the casket for a final farewell, Christopher dismissed him sharply: “No. Just bury her.”
They walked away without a single tear, leaving me to the earth.
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Then came Barnaby, the cemetery dog. Sniffing and whimpering, the animal refused to leave my grave, jumping into the trench and pawing madly against the pine box. As the first shovelfuls of wet dirt thudded above my head, feeling like finality itself, the paralysis receded just enough. I forced my hand upward and knocked against the wood.
The shovel stopped. The old man gasped, calling for his grandson Zachary to help dig. As desperate fingers clawed away the soil that was meant to swallow me whole, a fierce fire ignited in my chest. Christopher thought he had buried his past. Instead, he had just dug his own ruin.
