Widow Novels & Stories

At my husband, Matt Blanchard's, funeral, I forced my in-laws, Albert Blanchard and Thelma Sampson, to sign a document relinquishing their rights to his inheritance. Thelma kneeled on the ground in a frail manner. Her eyes brimmed with helpless tears. "Debbie, Matt is gone now! That means we're going to have to rely on you from now on. Please, you can't treat us like this…" Her face was ashen, and she wouldn't stop coughing either. She looked like she was terminally ill.

A week ago, the news broke that I'd filed a lawsuit against my wife of more than 20 years, Hazel Cooper, the woman who had shared my bed and my life for over half my adulthood. From that moment on, I became the neighborhood's favorite villain. Everyone called me the heartless man who had climbed his way to success and abandoned his wife and child without remorse. In their eyes, Hazel was flawless. She'd married me when I was poor and struggling. She never complained, even when life was hard. She cared for my sickly mother until her final days. She raised our son almost entirely on her own and turned him into a top student, the kind every family boasted about.

“Too clean. Too precise. These kills were done by a human.” I looked at him sharply. “A human?” He nodded. “That is what we think. They call her The Widow.” The name hung in the air for a long moment. The only sound in the room was the rain and the faint crackle of fire in the corner. “The Widow,” I repeated. “Why that name?” Jax shrugged. “No one knows for sure. Some say she wears black. Some say she moves like smoke and disappears before you even smell her. The rogues talk about her like she is not real. They say she kills without mercy and leaves nothing behind.”

The veil clung to her lips every time she tried to breathe. She did not shiver. She did not weep. The widow of Jonathan Hart had been raised to master herself in public. Her composure was a polished weapon, sharper than her cheekbones and colder than the diamonds in her ears. Thirty-four years old, still beautiful in a way that unnerved women and intrigued men, she had always carried herself with a touch of distance—untouchable, enviable. But death leveled all thrones. Now she was simply a woman burying her husband.

Ivy It's been three days since I arrived at this house, and I hadn't seen my husband since the night he bought me. Not that I wanted to see him. The Widower, they called him. Twelve dead wives. Twelve graves. I would be number thirteen. That alone was enough to make a man as cold as the grave. I sat by the window in the room they gave me and watched the gardens below. Perfect flowers. Perfect hedges. Everything was beautiful and controlled and dead inside.

I blinked, realizing I didn’t know she had been married. “I had no idea you were married before.” She looked away as if the memory was too painful to revisit. “I didn’t think it was important. But Anthony has a way of preying on vulnerable women. Especially widows.” A chill ran down my spine. I was a widow, too. Did she see me as his next victim? “How did you two meet?”

Leaning against his shoulder, Nola felt warmth fill her heart. Although Calder was older, everything he did was no worse than what a young man could do. In fact, he did even better. “Tell me about you too. Why did you stay single for twenty years after losing your wife?” Nola was curious. If she had not walked into the wrong room and slept with him back then, would he have remained single forever? “Heh. When a man loses his wife, it is not called being a widow. It is called being a widower.”

A storm brewed behind his cold eyes, his fury barely restrained. She had done it again. Allie Brooks was the only woman who could push him to the edge this easily. Three days, three times she had demanded a divorce. His voice dropped, dangerously soft. “Allie, when I married you, I forgot to mention something. There’s no word for ‘divorce’ in my dictionary. Only ‘widow.’” Allie’s breath caught. The venom in his words was unlike anything she had ever heard from him. A chill ran down her spine, but she refused to show fear. She clenched her jaw and stared him down, refusing to give him the satisfaction of seeing her waver.

An unmarried woman. My husband just divorced me.

she said softly. "Do you really love him so much to marry him?" Gina inquired. Ariana responded with a smile once again. "As far as I know, marrying a widower, especially one with a child, is not easy. This is Indonesia, not a Western country that easily accepts the status of a man or a woman. What I know about this country is the social perception of those who are widowed or widowers, virgins or not. Am I wrong?" the woman asked hesitantly.