I went to bu:ry my father… and found my husband’s mistress sitting in the front row, wearing my missing Versace like it belonged to her.

“My late client requested it be read before witnesses,” Blackwood said. “And since you chose to stage your own personal disaster in the front pew, the setting appears unusually appropriate.”

There are some moments in life when even grief has to step aside for structure. This was one of them.

Father Martinez rose from his chair near the altar with the expression of a man reconsidering every choice that had brought him to the priesthood. “Perhaps,” he said carefully, “we should take a brief recess.”

“No need,” I said.

I folded the pages. My fingers had stopped shaking.

“Thank you all for coming to honor my father,” I said into the mic. “He was a man of loyalty, precision, and timing. I think he would have appreciated that all three arrived today.”

Then I stepped down.

Grant called my name immediately. “Natalie—”

I walked right past him.

Up close, I caught his scent—cedar cologne, sweat, and the stale coffee he drank every morning from the blue travel mug I’d bought him ten Christmases ago. Familiar smells. Strange man.

Becca backed away from him as if money itself had turned contagious.

“You lied to me,” she hissed.

He grabbed for her elbow. “Rebecca, stop.”

She jerked free and hurried down the aisle, heels cracking against marble. My dress flashed one last time under the stained glass before she disappeared through the cathedral doors.

Grant started after her.

Aunt Helen blocked him with terrifying elegance. “Don’t you dare,” she said. “You’ve embarrassed this family enough for one lifetime.”

Outside, the California sun hit me like a hard, bright hand. The sky was indecently blue. Cars lined the curb. A few reporters had gathered because my father had been a public figure, but they were suddenly interested in more than his obituary. I could hear the cathedral doors open behind me, then voices rising, then Blackwood’s measured tone cutting across them all.

I sat on the stone steps because my knees went weak without warning.

And then, to my own horror, I laughed.

Not because anything was funny. Because sometimes when pain gets too crowded, your body chooses the wrong exit.

A shadow fell across me. Mr. Blackwood lowered himself onto the step beside me with the careful stiffness of a man who billed by the hour and had never once in his life sat on church stairs for free.