My corpse lay in the morgue. The air inside was almost freezing enough to make one feel stiff. It is said that after a person dies, their facial muscles relax, and the expression before death returns to calm. This was indeed true. Lying there, I looked as if I were simply asleep, free from the pain of my last moments.
When Simon Smith saw my corpse again, he no longer wore a stoic expression. He bit his lip hard, struggling to hold back the tears in his eyes. He reached out with trembling hands to stroke my arm. He removed the ring from my finger and, in the light, saw the initials engraved on it. In that instant, a tear fell onto the back of his hand.
What was he thinking? Perhaps he was recalling the moment of that terrible news, remembering how he had held me and drugged my drink, how he had tied me up and thrown me into the trunk. He might have also been recalling the sweet moments he shared with Hollie Owen while I struggled painfully in that trunk.
Others didn’t know. Only Simon Smith knew in his heart how desperately I had pleaded with him. He wanted to take my body home, but James Porter got there first. This hospital was owned by the Porter family, and when James Porter saw the test results, he almost rushed in with a knife to kill Simon Smith. If it hadn’t been for his family holding him back, he would have acted on his anger. He never expected Simon Smith to dare to show up.