The first time I died, it was a Tuesday in November. I had been in the hospital for eleven days. The doctors had told me the cancer was caught too late, that the treatments had not worked, that there was nothing more they could do. Charles had come to see me twice. The first time he brought flowers. The second time he brought a lawyer.
He had stood at the foot of my bed with the lawyer beside him and said, "Mara, I need you to sign something."
I had been too weak to argue. I had signed the papers without reading them. Later, I learned that they had transferred my remaining assets, the small savings I had kept, the life insurance policy from my mother, into a trust that Charles controlled. He had taken everything, and he had done it while I was dying.
The last thing I remembered was the
