Home Entertainment Game Technology Advertisement Part 2: For eight years, my parents made me leave the house every time my brother brought his fiance over; Mom said, “She comes from a good family, don’t embarrass us”; Dad added, “Just disappear for the weekend”; I did; then one weekend, I never came back; it took them four years to find out where I went.

I stared at her.

“I selected my own memorial tree.”

Avery began crying.

“Yes.”

Something inside me almost laughed.

Not because it was funny.

Because there are betrayals so elaborate that the mind cannot enter them through ordinary emotion.

I had tested the roots.

Checked the graft.

Written watering instructions.

Then sent Avery home with a living tree to commemorate my fictional death.

“What did the plaque say?”

She looked down.

IN MEMORY OF STACEY BENTON — FOREVER YOUNG.

I stood abruptly.

“Take me to the lawyer.”

Mara Whitfield's office was forty minutes away.

I had known her name without realizing it.

She handled my grandmother June's estate.

I remembered Mara at the funeral, standing near the church vestibule with a brown portfolio.

I had been in the back row.

Ignored.

Omitted from the obituary.

Alive.

Mara was sixty, silver-haired, and direct.

When I walked into her office, she stared at me for almost ten seconds.