Today Is My Husband’s Funeral. I Received An Anonymous Note Telling Me Not To Go. I Followed The Address In The Note And Found Him Having Breakfast With My Sister. What Should I Do Now?
Allies in the Shadows
That night, Chloe couldn’t stay in the house. She felt like the walls were watching her. She went out for a walk with no direction until she found herself in a small dive bar downtown, one of those places where no one asks questions. She ordered a coffee and sat at a table in the back.
She took out her notes and began to connect the dots. She drew lines in red pencil: Ethan, Caleb, Olivia, and in the middle, the word “money.”,
“Always so serious, aren’t you?”
a voice said, making her look up. An older man with white hair and small, piercing eyes was standing at her table. He wore a gray jacket and had a stern expression. He didn’t look like a customer. He didn’t belong there.
“Do I know you?”
“No, but you should. I’m Silas Thorne. Caleb’s brother.”
Chloe swallowed. There was no brother on record.
“I thought he had no close relatives. That’s what they said at the funeral.”
“But no one bothered to ask me.”
Silas stared at her, then sat down without being invited.
“I know who you are, Chloe. I know about Ethan, about Olivia, and I know you’re not crazy. I have questions too. A lot of them.”
“Why are you showing up now?”
Silas slid a folder across the table. Photos, documents, copies of messages.
“Because I’ve been investigating my brother’s death for two years. I never believed it was a heart attack. He was an athlete, healthy. And because when I saw the pictures of your husband, I recognized his face. He’s the same man who introduced himself as my brother’s lawyer.”
“I saw him. I confronted him. He said he was a financial manager. Then he disappeared. A few days later, Caleb was dead.”
Chloe felt her heart pound in her chest.
“Why didn’t you go to the police?”
“I tried, but I had no proof. Just a gut feeling. Until now.”
He pushed a photograph toward her. A picture taken from a distance, blurry but clear. Ethan entering Olivia’s house. They were holding hands. It was dated three months before his death.
“What do you want?”
“The same thing you want. To expose them. But not just anyway. We need to expose them in a way they can’t hide from. If they’re burying the living or stealing identities, this goes beyond our families. This is a criminal network.”
Chloe looked at him with doubt but also with a sense of necessity. She couldn’t do this alone anymore.
“I need to know if Caleb is really dead.”
“I have a contact at the morgue. Tomorrow we can confirm if his body ever passed through there or not. If it never arrived, your theory is correct, and we’re not chasing ghosts but accomplices.”,
Chloe agreed, not out of trust but out of desperation. That night she returned to the hotel with a strange mix of strength and nausea. The idea that Olivia might have killed Caleb, or worse, that Ethan had assumed his identity, was no longer an exaggeration. It was a possibility.
The Many Faces of Deceit
Before sleeping, she opened the black notebook again. She read a page she had previously overlooked.
“Next phase: clean accounts, close cycles, start over with a new name. Everything is ready for Olivia. The rest depends on timing.”
That “new name” made her think. What if Ethan was no longer Ethan? What if he had replaced Caleb or someone else? She looked at the ceiling, the echo of her own breathing the only thing keeping her on this side of sanity. Because now she knew there wasn’t just one fake funeral. There were two. And perhaps soon there would be more.
That idea replayed in Chloe’s mind like a sentence. The nights felt endless. Her eyes wide open staring at the ceiling, constantly re-examining the connections, the faces, the words written in her notebook. Ethan hadn’t faked his death just to escape her. There was something darker, colder behind it. It wasn’t just infidelity. It was a pattern, a system, a network.,
The next morning, Silas picked her up in front of the hotel. He had another folder. Chloe opened it as soon as she got in the car. It contained copies of emails, printed text messages, surveillance photos.
In most of the images, Ethan—or the man she thought was her husband—appeared. In some, he called himself Alvaro. In others, Cesar. In a few documents, he appeared with an ID in the name of Reese Valarius.
“Where did you get these?”
“A woman contacted me a few months ago,” Silas answered, his eyes on the road. “She said she knew him as Reese. He introduced himself as a businessman, a widower with a daughter in Europe. He borrowed money for a real estate investment. When she started to suspect something, he vanished.”
“How did you find her?”
“On a forum for victims of romance scams. I started it out of desperation. I never thought anyone would answer.”
Chloe examined one of the emails the woman had sent to Silas. It contained screenshots of a conversation. The phrases were identical to what Ethan had told her for years.
“No one has ever understood me like you do. You’re the only one who makes me feel alive. I just need to sort out a family issue and then we can be together forever.”
It was like watching a play repeated for different audiences. Silas handed her a number written on a napkin.
“Call her. Her name is Sophia. She’s willing to talk to you.”
Chloe made the call from a public pay phone. The voice on the other end was firm, steady, with a calmness forged from ashes.
“Hello, Chloe. I’ve been waiting for you.”
