Part One: The Smell of Lilies
I understood I was being burned alive the moment lily petals reached me through the dark.
At first, it felt like a nightmare I couldn’t wake from.
My eyes refused to open.
My fingers wouldn’t respond.
I couldn’t even push a sound past my tongue.
But my hearing worked perfectly.
The prayers.
The stifled sobs.
The quiet scuff of costly shoes moving across marble.
Mourners murmured about my “sudden heart attack” as if I were already nothing but a memory.
That was when it hit me.
I wasn’t lying in a hospital room.
I was sealed inside my own casket.
Forty-five years old, chief executive of Blackridge Bourbon, a family business worth hundreds of millions — and fully conscious while a room full of people grieved for me.
I tried to cry out.
Nothing came.
My body stayed frozen.
A woman close by wept openly.
“My poor husband,” Victoria said. “He worked too hard. I begged him to slow down.”
My wife.
Even muffled by the coffin’s padding, I knew that rehearsed quiver in her voice.
People hurried to console her.
Someone called her devoted.
Someone else said I’d been fortunate to have her.
Had I been able to laugh, I would have.
Then the tea came back to me.
Victoria had handed it to me the night before, while I lay in bed feeling faint and unsteady.
“Drink this,” she’d murmured softly. “Dr. Vance says it’ll help your heart.”
Dr. Harrison Vance.
My personal cardiologist.
My closest friend.
The man I’d entrusted with my life.
I remembered swallowing three mouthfuls.
I remembered the room spinning.
I remembered Victoria’s eyes on me over the rim of the cup.
Not anxious.
Waiting.
Then nothing.
Now, wrapped in lilies and satin, it all made sense.
My death hadn’t come out of nowhere.
It had been engineered.
Part Two: The Grieving Widow
The service took place in the small chapel at Blackridge Manor, my family’s estate on the edge of Louisville, Kentucky.
I knew that room intimately. My mother’s memorial had been held there years before.
