After They Buried Me

The day they told me it was terminal, my girlfriend showed up in a wedding dress and got down on her knees beside my hospital bed to propose. She said, "Even if you've only got three months, I want to be your wife for those three months." The video did millions of views, and she became the most devoted girlfriend the internet had ever seen. But I knew I didn't have long, and I couldn't stand to drag her down with me. So I quietly stopped every drug keeping me alive and signed everything I owned over to her. I passed out from the pain most nights, my skin broke open and wept, and I swallowed all of it. All I wanted was for the rest of her life to be easy. Then, the night I signed the last of the transfer papers, half conscious, I heard my parents crying outside the room. "I know we wanted him to learn, but this drug is destroying him." My mother could barely get it out. She'd found the bloody tissues I'd hidden in my bedding too many times. And my fiancee, Vivienne Whitfield, said coldly, "If it doesn't hurt, he'll never agree to let Connor come home. "So we told him he had cancer and put him through chemo. Once Connor's back, the Whitfields can keep Gabriel for the rest of his life, even if he never walks again." Connor was the fake heir, the boy swapped for me all those years ago. My one condition for coming home had been that he leave. Off the antidote, my lungs kicked up another clot of blood. What none of them knew was simple. I didn't have much time left to keep playing this out with them.