Chapter 15
Claudette
Michael’s laptop sat on his desk, closed but still warm beneath my fingers. Recently used. I opened it and the screen lit up immediately, harsh blue light making me squint.
Password prompt.
I typed his birthday. Nothing. My birthday. Still nothing.
I sighed in frustration, glancing briefly at the door before trying one last time. Our anniversary. My fingers moved before I could second-guess myself.
The laptop unlocked.
His password was the day we got married. It should have felt sweet. It didn’t. It was the last thing I could focus on right now.
I opened the browser, cursor hovering as I tried to figure out what I was even looking for.
The browsing history might as well have been the most boring thing ever—travel sites, restaurant reservations, news articles about technology and business acquisitions.
Nothing personal. Nothing that hinted at a life with me.
Nothing that proved we’d ever existed before Vegas.
His email folders were the same. Work correspondence, meeting schedules, board member communications.
Nothing.
Not one message between us.
I checked his photo library next, scrolling through folders organized by date like everything Michael touched. Business events, property photos, screenshots of documents.
Not a single photo of us together. Nothing except that wedding video everyone had seen.
My hands trembled on the trackpad, the absence louder than any evidence could have been.
A year of being together—a year I couldn’t remember—and there was nothing. No digital footprint of our relationship, no saved messages, no candid photos. Like I’d been erased from his life. Like we’d never existed before Vegas.
The absence was louder than any evidence could have been.
I closed the laptop, that sick feeling in my stomach growing and spreading through my chest. My breathing was coming faster now, shallow and uneven.
Something was wrong. Something was very wrong.
I turned to his desk drawers and yanked the first one open. Pens, business cards arranged in a small wooden box, a leather notebook with meeting notes in Michael’s precise handwriting, charging cables wound neatly with velcro ties because of course they were.
I slammed it shut harder than I meant to. The sound echoed in the quiet office, making me flinch.
The second drawer didn’t budge. Locked.
My breath caught as I yanked on it, but it didn’t budge. Why would he lock one drawer? What was in there that needed hiding?
I looked around the office, pulse hammering in my ears. Where would Michael hide something important?
My eyes drifted to the file cabinet—tall, metal, ominously neat.
I crossed to it and tried the top drawer.
Locked. All of them locked.
My hands were shaking badly as I dropped to my knees, running my palms under the desk, along every edge, every surface. My fingers caught on tape. A tug—and a small brass key dropped into my palm.
For a moment I just knelt there, key clutched in my fist. This was it. Whatever Michael was hiding, it was in that cabinet.
Did I want to know?
Stupid question. I was already here, already searching, and suspecting.
I stood on shaking legs and went back to the cabinet. The key slid into the lock with a soft metallic sound that seemed too loud in the quiet room.
The drawer slid open with a soft metallic sigh.
Files. All of them alphabetically organized. Tab labels in his neat handwriting—Ashford Technologies – Board Minutes, Budget Projections Q3, Contracts – Pending Review
I flipped through them, my fingers clumsy and rushing.
Something slipped out from between two folders and fluttered to the floor.
A magazine slipped free—old, crumpled, hidden like a secret someone didn’t want found.
I bent down and picked it up. The cover showed a woman in a cream dress—elegant, poised, diamonds glittering at her throat and a massive engagement ring catching the light.
Hannah Pierce.
The woman from the carnival.
The headline punched the air out of my lungs:
Hannah Pierce and Michael Ashford Announce Engagement.
The blood drained out of me so fast the room tilted. My heart might've stopped because I couldn’t feel anything. I could hear nothing but the sound of blood pummeling in my ears.
Hannah.
I’d asked him if she was his ex, my gut instinct had been right. But Michael had denied it, but why? The magazine was dated just four months ago.
It slipped from my numb fingers.
Hannah at the carnival, the way she’d looked at me—not hostile, but sad, understanding, like she’d known something I didn’t. Pauline’s careful subject changes whenever I mentioned her. Michael’s vague non-answers about his past. Everyone protecting the same lie.
He’d called off his wedding to Hannah… and married me instead.
The room felt too small, too hot. My chest was tight, breath coming in short gasps as I turned back to the cabinet, hands shaking so badly I could barely grip the files. Flipping through them faster now, desperate for something, anything else.
Then I saw it.
A folder near the back, thicker than the others, edges worn like it had been opened and closed many times.
Claudette – Medical
I stared at my own name written on the folder.
Medical.
Why would Michael have the medical folder about me in his office?
My hands were shaking so violently I almost couldn’t pull it out. The folder was heavy, full of something that made my chest feel like it was being crushed.
I carried it to the desk and set it down, just stood there staring at it. Part of me knew—knew—that opening it would change everything, would shatter whatever remained of the life I thought I’d been living.
But I’d already come this far.
I opened it.
The first page was an MRI scan.
My brain. A cross-section of my own brain.
And there, in the temporal lobe—a mass. Dark and foreign, taking up space where it shouldn’t be.
A tumor.
I had a brain tumor.
My legs buckled. I collapsed into Michael’s desk chair, the folder spilling across the wood.
I forced myself to pick up the next page, medical terminology I barely understood swimming in front of my eyes. But certain words stood out, impossible to miss.
Patient: Claudette Specter, DOB: [date]
Diagnosis: Glioblastoma Multiforme – Grade IV.
Location: Temporal and parietal lobes
Status: Inoperable
Prognosis: 4-6 months median survival from diagnosis
The date of the diagnosis read ten months ago.
Recommended treatment: Palliative care only. Symptom management. Quality of life focus.
Three to six months. I was already past that.
I should already be dead.
The words on the page blurred as my hands shook so badly the paper rattled.
A bolt of headache struck to me. I could see it. Feel it, like a dam had been burst open in my skull.
Dr. Rivera’s office with its beige walls that felt like they were closing in. Diplomas on the wall behind his desk. The clock that seemed too loud, ticking away seconds I didn’t have.
My parents on either side of me, their hands gripping mine so tight it hurt.
Dr. Rivera’s mouth moving, forming words I’d known were coming but still wasn’t ready to hear.
The decision to go to Vegas. To escape. To do something—anything—that felt like living instead of dying.
The wedding in that chapel.
The drive to the desert to watch the sunrise.
The seizure that had stolen everything.
Waking up in the hospital not knowing any of it—not remembering I was dying.
I was dying!
It felt like a dream yet so familiar. The sobs came suddenly, violently. I pressed my hand over my mouth but couldn’t stop them. Tears streamed hot down my face, blurring everything in front of me.
I was dying. Actually dying. Three to six months and I was already past that timeline, living on borrowed time that should have already run out.
My hand touched something else in the folder.
A journal.
Stars and moons on the cover, faded now. The bucket list Pauline and I had made.
I pulled it out with trembling, wet hands..
My own teenage handwriting—big and loopy and optimistic:
100 Things To Do Before I Turn Thirty
But it was violently crossed out, black ink slashed through the words over and over until the original text was barely visible.
Above it, in shakier handwriting that I also recognized as mine—recent, desperate: Before I Die
My vision swam with fresh tears.
I flipped through pages with shaking hands.
Number 23: Have a man win me something ridiculous at a carnival.
Number 61: Bake something from scratch with someone I love –
Number 40: Kiss at the top of a ferris wheel.
The carnival. The baking. The ferris wheel kiss that had felt so spontaneous, so perfect, so real.
None of it had been real. None of it had been mine. None of it had been his idea.
He’d been working through my stupid teenage bucket list, giving a dying girl what she’d written down when she was sixteen and thought she had forever.
Every perfect moment had been, planned, checked off a list like a task to complete.
Not because he loved me.
Because he pitied me.
I wasn’t Michael’s wife.
I was his charity case.
His dying obligation.
Every “I love you” had been said with an expiration date in mind.
The sobs came harder now, different—not just grief but betrayal, sharp and bitter in my throat. I hunched over the journal as tears fell onto the pages, smudging the ink. My whole body shook with the force of crying.
I sat in his office surrounded by proof of my own death, when I heard footsteps.
Coming down in this direction. Fast. Running.
The office door burst open.
Michael stood in the doorway, chest heaving like he’d sprinted up the stairs.
He took in the scene— the open cabinet, papers scattered everywhere, the medical folder spread across the desk, the journal in my lap, tears streaming down my face.
Our eyes met through my blurry vision.
The act was over.
The illusion had shattered.
And there was no going back.
Time to face my brutal reality.