LOVING ME AND MY QUADRUPLETS

The Man In The Hood

Chapter 4 — Anna's POV

During my husband's burial, I couldn't eat. I hadn't eaten in days, if I was honest with myself — food felt like a betrayal, like swallowing meant accepting a world where Vince didn't exist anymore, and I wasn't ready to accept anything. My body had gone numb in a way I didn't know was possible, like grief had reached into me and switched something off.

There were moments during the ceremony when I genuinely wanted to go with him. Not in some dramatic, desperate way — just a quiet, aching wish that I could close my eyes and wake up wherever he was, so I wouldn't have to keep living in a version of my life that no longer made sense. A world without Vince in it didn't feel like a world I recognized.

Elizabeth stood beside me the whole time, her hand gripping mine so tightly I could feel her pulse, trying to hold me together through sheer force of will. But nothing she said reached me. I couldn't hear the pastor's words over the sound of my own heartbeat, over the roaring in my ears that hadn't stopped since the moment Marcus called me. I couldn't even hold my babies — my mother and my sister had to carry them the entire service, because every time I looked at their small faces, I saw pieces of him staring back, and it was more than I could bear on a day like this.

Across from me, Marcus stood just as broken. I watched him mourning his brother the same way I mourned my husband, his shoulders rigid, his jaw clenched like he was fighting to hold himself upright by will alone. For a moment I thought maybe we could hold each other up through it, lean on each other the way family is supposed to. But grief doesn't share well. It just multiplies, filling every space it's given.

I couldn't stand it anymore — the flowers, the black clothes, the murmured condolences from people who didn't really know Vince, who only knew his name from a business card or a headline in the financial section. I turned and ran, my heels sinking into the soft grass, until I found myself near the back of the cemetery, past the newer headstones, past the old trees that marked the edge of the property where the noise of the service finally faded into silence.

That was when I saw him.

A figure in a black hood, standing perfectly still among the older graves, watching. Watching *me*, I was certain of it — even from that distance, even with his face hidden in shadow, I could feel the weight of his attention like a hand pressed against my chest.

"Who are you?" I called out, my voice cracking down the middle.

He didn't answer. For one long second, neither of us moved, and I swear I felt something pass between us — recognition, maybe, or warning. Then he turned and ran, fast, faster than I expected anyone in a long coat to move, weaving between headstones like he'd walked this path before. My heels weren't made for chasing anyone across uneven ground, and within seconds he was gone, swallowed whole by the trees at the edge of the property, as if he'd never been there at all.

I stood frozen, breathless, my heart hammering so hard I thought it might give out right there among the graves. *Who was that? Why was he watching me? Why did he run the second I spoke?*

I didn't know what else to do, so I went to find Marcus, half-stumbling across the grass, my mind racing faster than my legs could carry me.

He was still near the grave when I reached him, his eyes red and swollen, and I could see he was barely holding himself together. But I couldn't keep it in — the words spilled out before I could stop them.

"Marcus, I saw someone," I said, breathless. "A man, in a black hood, at the back of the cemetery. He was watching us. When I called out to him, he ran."

Marcus looked at me the way you look at someone you're afraid might be breaking in front of you.

"Anna—"

"I'm serious," I said, gripping his arm. "I saw him. He was right there, I swear it."

He stepped closer, his voice gentle but firm, the way you'd speak to someone standing too close to the edge of something. "Anna, I know you love my brother. I know how much you loved him. But there's no one there. I didn't see anyone." He hesitated, and I watched something shift behind his eyes, something like fear he was trying to hide. "Are you sure you're not seeing things?"

"Are you saying I've lost my mind?" My voice cracked again, sharper this time, hurt bleeding into something closer to anger. "I know what I saw, Marcus. I am not imagining a man standing at the edge of my husband's funeral."

"I'm not saying that." He reached for my hands, his own trembling in a way that didn't match his calm tone. "I love my brother too. I miss him just as much as you do. I just think— grief does things to people. I think maybe you're hallucinating."

"I am not hallucinating," I said, tears spilling over again, hot and fast down my face. "There was a man there. In a black hood. He looked directly at me, and then he ran the moment I opened my mouth."

"Anna, there's no one there," he said again, softer now, like repeating it might make it true for both of us. "Nothing feels real right now. I understand that more than anyone."

I wanted to scream at him that I knew the difference between grief and a stranger's eyes on me across a cemetery, that fear like that doesn't come from nowhere. But the look on his face stopped me — the exhaustion, the barely-hidden fear, the desperate need to believe his brother was simply *gone* and nothing more complicated than that.

He pulled me into a hug, and I let him, because I didn't have the strength left to argue. I let him hold me while I cried, while he murmured that everything would be okay, while somewhere beneath the surface of my grief a single word rose, one I already knew far too well.

*The oath.*

I'd known about it since the night Vince died — Marcus had said the word to me himself, right after I woke up from fainting, though he'd never once explained what it actually meant, and I'd been too shattered that night to press him. Every time I'd tried to bring it up since, he'd found a way to slide past it, like he was hoping I'd forget it existed. I never did. I couldn't. It had been sitting in the back of my mind for weeks now, a locked door I didn't have the key to.

Standing there in his arms, tears soaking into his black suit jacket, a thought crept in that I couldn't push back out, no matter how hard I tried.

*I hope this isn't what I think it is. I hope the hood, the man running, this cold feeling that won't leave me — I hope none of it is happening to me because of the oath.*

Because if it was...

...then whatever Marcus refused to tell me wasn't just a family secret he was protecting.

It was something that had already followed me here, into the very ground where I'd just buried my husband.