Three days after my death, William received the call to identify my body. He casually tightened his arm around the woman sitting in his lap and spoke into the phone. “If she is dead, she is dead. Cremate her and call me when it is done.” My body was pushed into the roaring incinerator. Once I was reduced to nothing but bone and ash, the crematorium staff called him again. He clicked his tongue in deep annoyance. “I got it. I am on my way.” 1 By the time William Schmidt finally arrived, two hours had already passed. His dress shirt was wrinkled, and a glaring red lipstick stain marked his collar. It was incredibly obvious that he had just rolled out of someone else’s bed. He found the staff member and sneered. “Where are Nora’s ashes? Didn’t you call me here to pick them up?” Once the worker confirmed his identity, he carefully handed over the wooden urn containing my remains. William took it with careless hands, his eyes swirling with pure mockery. “Are these really Nora’s ashes? You didn’t just sweep up some random roadkill to mess with me, did you?” The worker looked horrified. “Mr. Schmidt, these are absolutely the young lady’s remains. We have the official logs. Would you like to see the paperwork?” William let out a dark chuckle. “No need. I believe you.” I breathed a sigh of relief. I had no idea why my body was dead, yet my soul was still lingering around. I had thought about it endlessly, figuring it was simply because my remains hadn’t been properly laid to rest. Now that William believed I was actually dead, I figured he would at least toss me in a grave somewhere. Even if he hated my guts, surely he would do it just for the sake of our past history. But my relief was violently cut short. A second later, William let out a fake, exaggerated gasp. The urn slipped directly through his fingers. My ashes spilled across the dirty tile floor. A cruel, twisted smile stretched across his face. “Oops. My hand slipped.” Saying that, he extended his foot, grinding the expensive leather sole of his shoe directly into my ashes. My phantom breath hitched in my throat. I stared into his mocking, dead eyes. I opened my mouth, but no sound came out. It wasn’t until my ashes were completely ground into the cracks of the floor, mixed with the everyday dirt and grime, that William finally pulled his foot back with a satisfied look. Leaving the crematorium worker in absolute shock, William laughed. “Make sure you pass a message on to Nora for me. Tell her this new little trick of hers is creative, but it is a massive failure.” “My mother’s death anniversary is in a few days. She better drag herself to the cemetery and beg for forgiveness. Otherwise, even if she really is dead, I have no problem digging up her corpse and whipping it to pieces.” His final words dripped with a freezing venom that would make anyone’s blood run cold. And I knew he was entirely capable of doing exactly that. Suddenly, I felt a wave of twisted gratitude that my body had already been burned. If it hadn’t, the scene at the graveyard would have been utterly gruesome. Before the worker could even argue with him, William’s phone rang. The strange thing was, my soul was forced to follow him. Trapped by some invisible tether, I sat in the passenger seat of his luxury car, listening to him chat with the woman on the other end of the line. I knew that voice perfectly. It was Ivy Schmidt, the adopted daughter of the Schmidt family. Back when William and I were still madly in love, she had come to me privately, demanding that I leave him. When I refused, she made it her mission to destroy me. She spread vile rumors at my workplace and even hired thugs to corner me in alleys. When William found out, he ripped into her. He threatened to kick her out of the family completely if she ever laid a finger on me again. That was the only reason she had finally backed off. Now, just hearing my name made William’s expression turn ice cold. “Why are we talking about her?” he snapped into the phone. “It ruins my mood. It’s not like she is actually dead anyway.” “But what if she really is dead, William? What would you do?” Ivy’s probing voice filtered through the speakers. My phantom heart clenched. I instinctively turned my head to look at him. If this had been the old William, he would have been sick with worry if I even got a papercut. He used to tell me I was his greatest treasure, promising to hold me in the palm of his hand for the rest of his life. But now, William just let out a cold, sharp laugh. “Then I would throw a massive three day party and light up the entire city with fireworks to celebrate.” 2 I stared at him with wide, disbelieving eyes. It was only in this exact moment that I realized just how deeply William Schmidt hated me. He hated me so much that my death was literally a cause for celebration. But William, I really am dead. You just refuse to believe it. The car pulled up in front of an elite bridal boutique. William stepped out, striding toward the entrance with purpose. He looked so eager. It reminded me of the day we had secretly gotten our marriage license, right before he dragged me to a boutique just like this one. Back then, he couldn’t wait to see me in a wedding dress. He had held me so tight, whispering that I was the most beautiful bride in the world. Now, he was looking at Ivy with that exact same tender, loving gaze. She was standing on the pedestal, wrapped in a stunning white gown. He gently tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear, his voice softer than velvet. “You look beautiful.” Ivy lowered her head with a shy smile. When she looked back up, her eyes were shimmering with happy tears. “William, I have waited so long for you.” I watched in absolute horror as Ivy leaned forward and pressed her lips to his cheek. Every instinct in my soul screamed to stop them. I lunged forward, but my hands passed right through William’s solid chest. I could only stand there, entirely helpless, as he slid a massive diamond ring onto her finger. How could he do this? Why Ivy, out of all people? She was the one who murdered his mother! William! I screamed his name, my phantom throat raw and burning with absolute despair. I watched the rest of the fitting in a state of total numbness. Ivy stared at herself in the mirror, practically glowing with excitement. Suddenly, she turned to him. “By the way, William. Is she okay?” We both knew exactly who she was talking about. William’s face went completely blank, laced with a heavy dose of disgust. “What could possibly be wrong with her? It is just another one of her pathetic little games.” “Should we send her an invitation to our wedding?” William lowered his eyelashes, hiding the dark emotions swirling in his eyes. A twisted, malicious smirk slowly crept onto his lips. “Of course we will invite her. She is our guest of honor.” The realization hit me like a freight train. William wanted to force me to watch him get married. After all, a proper wedding was the one thing I had always dreamed of. Because his mother had never approved of me, we only ever signed the legal papers. We never had a ceremony. Over the years, having a real wedding had become my ultimate, unattainable fantasy. And then, his mother died. A massive heart attack that the doctors could not fix. On the night she died, her very last phone call was to me. Because of that, William naturally assumed that I had said something to trigger the attack. He fully believed I had killed her. On the day of her funeral, he dragged me to the cemetery and physically forced me to kneel in front of her gravestone for an entire day and night. The rain was pouring down in sheets. We stared at each other through the freezing downpour. His eyes were dead, filled with an apocalyptic level of hatred. He told me, “From now on, Nora, I will make you wish you were dead.” From that day forward, I went from being the love of his life to his sworn, mortal enemy. He hated me. He humiliated me. But he flat out refused to let me leave him. He even started bringing different women home to spend the night. Whenever he saw my red, tear stained eyes, he would just laugh, lightly slapping my cheek to mock me. “Does it hurt, Nora? You brought every bit of this upon yourself. Who else can you blame?” I tried so hard to explain the truth, but it only made him worse. He never once doubted his own conclusion, because he knew exactly how much his mother despised me. She had sworn up and down that she would never let me officially enter the Schmidt family. William had fought with her constantly over it, nearly severing his ties with his own family just to be with me. But how could a man accept that the woman he loved had murdered the woman who gave birth to him? He couldn’t. After putting Ivy in a cab, William seemed to suddenly remember I existed. He generously pulled my number out of his blocked list. Tapping his fingers against the steering wheel, he dialed my phone. A long minute passed. I watched his relaxed eyebrows slowly pull together into a furious scowl. He slammed his fist against the steering wheel, screaming into the empty car. “You are asking for a death wish, Nora. How dare you ignore my calls!” But he had no idea. It wasn’t that I was ignoring him. It was that I could never pick up a phone again. 3 Half a month later, William finally returned to the house we used to share. He violently kicked the front door open, his voice echoing through the empty halls. “Nora! Get your ass out here right now!” He kicked open door after door, but he never found my shadow. His already grim expression turned pitch black. He barked orders at his security team to track me down, his voice dripping with lethal intent. “If she wants to run, she better run to the ends of the earth. Because the second I catch her, I am breaking both of her legs.” Yet, the woman whose legs he wanted to break was floating right in front of his face. A few minutes later, his subordinates sent him a GPS pin. William’s face morphed into something truly terrifying. I glanced over at his phone screen and realized the pin was locked onto Frank’s house. “Boss, the Madam’s last phone call was to Mr. Frank. But Mr. Frank claims he hasn’t seen her. We suspect he is hiding her.” William’s voice dropped to a deadly whisper. “Wait for me.” He drove like a maniac, speeding all the way to Frank’s front door. With a dark, murderous glare, he started kicking the heavy oak door. One kick. Two kicks. On the third kick, the door swung open. Frank stood there looking completely dead inside. Deep, dark bags hung heavily beneath his eyes. “Can I help you?” William sneered. “You are hiding my wife in your house, and you have the nerve to ask if you can help me?” Frank’s face remained entirely blank, like a man who had lost his final reason to live. “I am not hiding her. She is dead. Didn’t the crematorium call you to come pick up her ashes?” “She actually got you to play along with this pathetic script? Wow. It seems she is really desperate to hide from me this time.” William still didn’t believe I was dead. He stubbornly clung to the idea that this was just another elaborate game. He tilted his head back, screaming into the depths of the house. “Nora! Do not think for a second that Frank can protect you from my mother’s death anniversary! I am counting to three. If you do not walk out here right now, I will tear this place apart.” Three. Two. One. The second the countdown finished, William brutally kicked Frank in the stomach and ordered his men to tear the house apart. Frank fell hard against the floor. A flicker of raw rage finally broke through his dead expression. “William! She is dead! You went to the crematorium and claimed her ashes yourself! Did you already forget?!” “She is dead. She has been dead for weeks!” Frank grabbed William by the collar of his expensive shirt, slamming him hard against the wall. William’s expression turned vicious. He mocked him without mercy. “Still trying to hide her, even now? You really are pathetically in love with her, Frank. It is a damn shame she is already used goods. I have ruined her. Maybe whenever I finally get bored of her, I will toss her your way.” “But not today. Today, she has to go bleed in front of my mother’s grave. She doesn’t have time to play house with you.” Frank’s face flushed a violent red from his neck to his forehead. His hands tightened like a vice around William’s collar. “You piece of trash.” He threw a brutal punch straight into William’s jaw. William let out a muffled groan of pain. In a matter of seconds, the two men were engaged in a violent, bloody fistfight on the hardwood floor. The old superstitions always said that ghosts couldn’t feel anything. But floating there in the living room, my chest felt so tight I thought it was going to explode. Frank was in good shape, but William was professionally trained in combat. It didn’t take long for William to pin him entirely to the floor, leaving Frank’s face bruised and bleeding. I was pacing in frantic circles, completely powerless to stop it. “Look at how pathetic you are, Frank,” William spat, panting heavily. “Getting beaten half to death over Nora. And where is she? Hiding in the back, happily letting you take the hits.” “Is a woman like that really worth all this?” Frank let out a sharp, bloody laugh, his eyes filled with absolute disgust. “You are the pathetic one, William. A man who can’t even recognize his own mother’s murderer. A man who tortures the only woman who ever actually loved him. You are living a life worse than a stray dog.” “What the hell did you just say?” William pulled his fist back, ready to cave Frank’s face in. Right then, a panicked voice shouted from the doorway. “Boss! We pulled the traffic cam footage of her accident. And… we got a copy of her autopsy report.” 4 William froze in absolute shock. Taking advantage of the distraction, Frank threw a vicious uppercut right into William’s jaw. Frank pushed himself off the floor, looking down at William’s bewildered face with pure icy contempt. “Now get your men and get the hell out of my house.” But William totally ignored him. He scrambled off the floor and sprinted straight into Frank’s home office. The heavy mahogany desk was covered in photographs. Every single photo was of me. My face was a ruin of blood, the features so mangled and destroyed that it was almost impossible to recognize me. I only took one look before I had to turn my phantom head away. I knew exactly how horrifying my corpse looked. One of my eyeballs had been dislodged, and the left side of my skull was sickeningly caved in. When the medical examiner was trying to identify my body, it had taken them hours of forensic work. Yet, Frank had printed these nightmare inducing photos out and left them scattered all over his desk. I couldn’t help but wonder if he was terrified of having nightmares. Now, William had those exact photos in his trembling hands. He was staring at them with a terrifying intensity, as if he was searching for a hidden zipper or a mask, refusing to miss a single detail. His grip was so tight that the glossy paper began to crumple. As his subordinate kept talking, William’s eyes slowly dragged up to the bright computer monitor. The screen was looping the security footage of my accident. Two cars colliding head on at massive speeds. My car practically launched into the air upon impact. The visual was absolutely gut wrenching. William’s eyes instantly flooded with a violent, bloody red. His hand shook uncontrollably over the computer mouse, yet he obsessively replayed the gruesome crash over and over again. “How did you know she was in a crash?” William’s voice was completely destroyed, sounding like grinding sandpaper. He must have been losing his mind wondering how Frank knew something he didn’t. Frank crossed his arms, his voice dripping with venom. “You already know the answer. Her very last phone call was to me.” “She barely had the strength to breathe, but she used the very last ounce of her life to tell me a secret.” “What secret?” William asked, his voice cracking with desperation. But Frank was in no rush. He stood there, soaking in William’s panic and agony like a fine wine. “I asked you what the secret was!” William screamed, his eyes practically bulging out of his skull. Finally, Frank dropped his mocking smile. His face turned to stone. “She said that the person who murdered your mother… was Ivy.” “Bullshit.” William rejected the truth instantly. He shook his head frantically, taking a step back. “It couldn’t be Ivy. My mother treated her like gold.” “You are lying to me, Frank.” “This is a trap you and Nora set up, isn’t it? You are just trying to help her escape me.” “Well you can forget it! You tell Nora that even if she really is dead, she belongs to me forever.” I lowered my eyes, forcing down the phantom ache rising in my chest. It didn’t matter anymore. I was already dead. Whether William believed the truth or not meant absolutely nothing to me now. He could never hurt me again. Forced by the invisible tether, I followed William out of Frank’s house. Just as I floated through the doorway, I felt an intense, burning gaze on my back. I turned around to find Frank staring directly at me. His eyes were totally red, and his lips trembled as he formed a silent word. Nora. I stood there paralyzed for a few seconds, my eyes burning with phantom tears. When he silently mouthed my name a second time, I finally knew for sure. Frank could actually see me. My nose stung. I wanted to run up and hug him, but the invisible tether yanked me backward, pulling me further and further away toward William’s car. Sitting in the passenger seat, drowning in the suffocating silence of William’s panic, my hands shook with overwhelming emotion. Frank was my childhood best friend. We grew up together, sharing every single secret we ever had. In college, when I first met William and started dating him, I had literally sprinted to Frank to share the news. When Frank heard I was in a relationship, his first reaction wasn’t happiness. He had just stared at me with a deeply complex, painful look. “Do you really love him? It isn’t just a fling?” I had answered without hesitation. “I love him. I want to spend the rest of my life with him.” That day, the usually loud and annoying Frank went completely silent. Shortly after, he applied to study abroad. William and I were fighting a massive war against his family’s disapproval. Between the stress and the distance, Frank and I slowly stopped talking. It wasn’t until William’s mother died, and William’s love turned into pure, abusive hatred, that Frank finally flew back home. He asked me to run away with him. His eyes were so desperate, so full of determination. But I couldn’t bring myself to abandon William when he was spiraling in grief. I rejected Frank’s offer. Furious at my stubborn blindness, Frank packed his bags and left the country again. He was gone for two years. And in those two years, William’s endless abuse finally killed every last drop of love I had for him. I was finally ready to leave. The second Frank heard the news, he booked a flight home without a single second of hesitation. But before I could leave, I had gone to the cemetery to light one final stick of incense for Mrs. Schmidt. And while I was there, I overheard Ivy screaming curses at her grave. That was how I found out the truth. On the night Mrs. Schmidt died, Ivy had gone to the house, demanding the old woman approve of her marrying William. When Mrs. Schmidt realized her adopted daughter’s sick obsession, it triggered a massive heart attack. Ivy literally snatched her emergency medication out of her hands and watched her die.
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