Chapter 10 - THE BLANK DEATH CERTIFICATEThe blank death certificate changed the case from horrifying to monstrous.
Detective Bennett arrived within twenty minutes. She put on gloves before touching the paper, though I had already held it with shaking hands.
At the top was my full legal name.
Natalie Anne Reeves.
Below it, empty boxes waited for dates, causes, signatures.
A form prepared for a body not yet found.
For a death not yet completed.
For me.
“Where did Diane get this?” I asked.
Bennett’s face was hard.
“That’s what we’re going to find out.”
The answer came from Charles.
Jason’s father was many things: proud, cold, loyal to money above blood. But he was not built for jail. After one night in a holding cell and one conversation with a criminal defense attorney who used words like conspiracy and life sentence, Charles began to separate himself from his family with the speed of a man leaving a burning building.
He claimed Diane had arranged the document.
Diane claimed Charles had.
Jason claimed he had never seen it.
Madison said Jason showed it to her on his laptop weeks earlier and joked that paperwork was “the easy part.”
Everyone was lying.
But not equally.
Bennett traced the form to a funeral director named Paul Landry, a distant cousin of Diane’s who operated a small funeral home two counties away. He had provided the blank document after Diane called, saying she wanted to prepare “just in case” because her daughter-in-law was terminally ill.
I was not terminally ill.
I was inconveniently alive.
Paul Landry insisted he thought he was helping a grieving family.
Then prosecutors found the payment.
Ten thousand dollars.
Cash.
Hidden in his office safe.
After that, he remembered more.
Diane had asked about decomposition.
About delayed discovery.
About whether a body found after “several weeks” could obscure details.
I listened to Bennett describe it and felt something inside me go quiet.
Diane had not merely agreed with Jason.
She had improved his plan.
That night, I walked through my house alone for the first time.
Amelia hated the idea. Bennett disliked it. Dr. Mercer would have forbidden it if I had asked her.
So I did not ask.
I moved slowly from room to room, one hand along the wall.
In the bedroom, the suitcase Jason had packed still sat in police storage somewhere, but I could see it anyway. I could hear the zipper. His smile. You’ll be fine.
In the bathroom, I found a hair tie I had dropped weeks before the incident. Such a tiny ordinary thing. Proof that life had existed before evidence markers.
In the kitchen, I opened the drawer where the emergency phone had been.
Empty.
I closed it.
Then opened the drawer beside it.
Inside was my grandmother’s old recipe notebook.
I had forgotten it was there.
Her handwriting filled the pages, bold and impatient.
At the back, tucked between recipes for lemon cake and pot roast, was a note she had written to me years earlier, after Jason and I got engaged.
Natalie,
Love should never make you smaller.
If a man needs your weakness to feel strong, leave before he learns to enjoy it.
— Grandma E.
I sank to the floor and held that page against my chest.
For the first time, I allowed myself to grieve something other than betrayal.
I grieved the woman I had been before Jason taught me to apologize for pain.
I grieved every dinner where I said “sorry” because my hands shook.
I grieved every appointment where he performed devotion in public and punished me with silence in the car.
I grieved the years I had mistaken tolerance for love.
Then the doorbell rang.
I froze.
No one was supposed to come without calling.
My phone buzzed almost immediately.
Bennett.
Do not open the door.
I looked toward the front window.
A woman stood on the porch.
Madison Cole.
She was crying.
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In one hand, she held a flash drive.
In the other, she held a gun.
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