My wife leaned over my hospital bed and told me she had been making me ill for weeks — two days later I signed four documents, and only one of them was a will.
“You’re finally going, Emory. I am so tired of pretending.”
I am fifty-six. I own a contract furniture plant in Kelsey Point, a house in Harrowden, two flats, and accounts that came to a little over eighty-two million dollars.
And a wife sixteen years younger than me who I married in 2021.
On the morning of the sixth of January, my cardiologist said something to a nurse outside my door, believing I was asleep.
“Five days. Maybe less.”
And that evening, at about twenty to ten, Bettina checked that the door was shut.
And she did not put on the face she wears for staff. She put on the other one.
“The plant, the house, the portfolio. All of it.”
“Rhodes and I have already looked at somewhere at Sable Cove. You worked like a dog your whole life and we are going to enjoy every single dollar of it.”
I tried to say something and nothing came out.
And she said: “Don’t. It’s done. Those capsules I’ve been bringing you every night — you never asked me once what they were. You’ve always trusted me far too much.”
And she did her lipstick, and she kissed my forehead, and she said the funeral would be short and private, because there is no sense spending money on a dead man when she has a car to buy.
And she left.
And I lay there and cried, and it was not about dying.
It was that four years of every touch and every “I love you” had been a performance, and I had bought all of it.
About twenty minutes later a young man came in to sort my blanket out.
Deniz Aksoy. Twenty-five. He works two shifts here and then goes and loads delivery lorries at night, because his sister Elif is fourteen and has a congenital heart defect, and the reconstructive operation she needs costs two point four million dollars.
