He hadn't been carrying me for seven years.
He'd been burying me. Slowly. On purpose. So he could inherit what was left.
"Alan," I said, and my voice was different — steady, clinical, the operating-room voice I hadn't used in seven years. "Sit down. We need to talk about the incapacity documents you filed with your firm."
His face went white.
He hadn't known I knew.
He hadn't known there was anything left in me capable of knowing.
PART 3
I didn't let Alan explain. I've watched too many people bleed out while someone explained. You act first, you explain never.
That night, after he stormed off to sleep in the guest room — furious, rattled, still not fully grasping that the invalid had woken up — I called Sergio back.
He sent me everything. The documents Alan had submitted to the firm. The spousal-incapacity provision. A physician's letter Alan had somehow obtained — I'd later learn he'd taken me to a "grief specialist" two years earlier who'd written notes Alan then badly misrepresented, cherry-picking a vulnerable widow's worst weeks to paint a portrait of permanent incompetence.
