Chapter 1The Ghost of Us: A Late Crematorium

I’ve read countless romance novels about the "regretful ex crawling back," but I never expected to become a character in one.

Except, in my story, there was no "crawling back." Only the ashes.

Because I was truly dead.

I became a ghost, tethered to the man who took me for granted. Seven days after my death, it was as if a delayed wave of grief had finally crushed him. In the home I could never return to, he howled, wept, and shattered into pieces.

You ask how I felt?

I just stood there, blankly, meticulously savoring every inch of agony on his face.

I listened earnestly to his desperate, agonizing wails over my departure.

Beneath the sorrow and heartbreak, a massive, twisted wave of schadenfreude surged within me.

A joyful, ecstatic sense of vindication.

It was a sharp, liberating thrill. I covered my mouth and laughed.

* * *

After I died, I became even more certain that Holden Crawford had never truly loved me.

When the police called him to identify my body at the morgue, he thought I had teamed up with my friends to pull a sick prank.

He thought it was just my way of forcing him to give me a way to step down from our fight.

Because right before I died, we had gotten into a massive argument. I had looked at his phone and seen texts from his ex-girlfriend.

In reality, they were just discussing work. There was no explicit flirting. But a woman’s sensitivity and suspicion caused my emotions to spiral out of control.

His ex-girlfriend. His "one that got away." His absolute muse.

He had never deleted the photos of them from his camera roll. Yet, in all the years we had been together, we didn't have a single picture together.

The day before, he was running a 102-degree fever. I stayed awake all night by his bed, nursing him. But in his feverish delirium, the name he mumbled was hers.

These things piled up, piece by piece, until my emotions erupted like a volcano.

Finally, Holden looked at me with exhaustion and said, "Harper, stop causing a scene."

Harper. He was always so cold and distant, calling me by my full name. But in his texts, he called his ex-girlfriend by her sweet nickname, "Ella." Why didn't he just call her Stella Montgomery?

Holden said I was being unreasonable.

He didn't know that this was just the final straw on a mountain of suppressed feelings. I didn't want the argument to escalate into something uglier, so I slammed the door and left.