My Husband Made Me Carry Coffins Five Years for a Pointless Test

Chapter 4

Before I could finish my sentence, Joel struck me so hard that my head snapped to the side.

"Do you really think Lucian will not be the laughingstock of the whole school after this coffin-carrying mess?" he demanded. "Did you have to crash this kindergarten graduation, Sylvia?"

My gaze raked over his designer suit, which was wrinkle-free unlike my life, and then landed on Tessa standing in the distance. She was dressed like she belonged on a runway. My cheek burned with a brand of humiliation that I had stupidly let him stamp on me.

Suddenly, I could not muster the energy to care anymore.

"Newsflash," I said. "I did not reveal my own damn job."

Joel's laugh was ice cold. "Tessa only said that to protect you," he replied. "And now you are blaming her?"

The real question choked me. Did he actually think my work was disgusting?

He answered without hesitation.

"Does shoveling corpses for cash rot your brain too?" Pure revulsion flashed in his eyes.

It was funny how he had sung a different tune five years ago when our son got sick. He had personally arranged this disgusting job for me. Back then, he had pleaded, "No job is beneath us when Lucian's life is at stake." He had promised, "We will always be proud of you." Now their pride had curdled into shame.

I swiped at the blood trickling from my lip. There was no point in explaining anything. He had already decided that I was the villain. Why should I beg for more abuse?

I stared him down. "Ashamed?" I said. "I have never been prouder."

Every coin in my pocket reeked of formaldehyde and exhaustion, but I had earned them honestly. I had spent five years lifting coffins and seeing death's cruelest faces. I went from vomiting at my first job to numb acceptance, and I had paid for Lucian's life with pieces of my soul.

Joel sneered. "You are beyond saving," he said. His nose wrinkled like he smelled garbage. "You would sell your soul for a stack of bills."

He would never know how I had sobbed over hospital invoices. The numbers were fifty thousand, then two hundred thousand, then eight hundred thousand. Those numbers climbed faster than my hope. I would count pennies for a sip of water and then walk away parched.

Even the grizzled old timers at the funeral home slipped me extra cash, though it was pity I could not swallow. I would get down on my knees to scoop up every last coin that mourners tossed aside during burials, and I felt no shame and no hesitation.

It tore me apart to see Lucian writhe in pain and to watch Joel's face grow more haggard with each passing day. But the people I clung to the hardest were the quickest to abandon me. They gnawed at my bones like starving dogs, and then they had the nerve to ask why my back grew more hunched by the day.

None of his opinions mattered now, not when I was already halfway out the door.

"You are damn right that I love money more than anything," I spat.

Just as the words left my mouth, Tessa's voice cut through the tension.

"Your little stunts might fly normally," she said, "but do you have any idea how much you will owe for ruining the kindergarten graduation?"

She added, her voice dripping with outrage, "Or have you forgotten that Lucian's two-hundred-thousand-dollar medical bill is still unpaid?"

The outrage in her voice felt almost personal, as if it were her own savings at stake.

She turned my stomach, this woman who had once hugged me and called me bestie. When we had met in London, I had actually believed that her kindness was genuine.

Then the skies opened up. When Tessa sneezed, Joel rushed to open the car door for her. His eyes turned to ice as he looked at me.

"Must you always look so miserable?" he snapped. His fingers closed around my wrist like a manacle.

I jerked back so hard that I nearly fell. "Don't you dare touch me!" I shouted.