During the funeral for my mother and brother, I saw my four-year-old daughter, Maddie, reach into my brother’s open casket. A collective gasp rippled through the mourners. I rushed to her side, my heart a cold stone in my chest.
“Maddie, no, honey,” I whispered, trying to gently pull her back. “They’re just making sure Uncle Steve looks nice for his long sleep.”
But she didn’t move. She just pointed a tiny finger across the room. “That man over there,” she said, her voice clear in the heavy silence. “The one with the blue tie. He wants me to give this paper to you, Mommy.”
She held out a small, folded note. I looked where she was pointing, but there was no one there. Just an empty chair draped in black. My blood ran cold as I took the paper. I unfolded it, and the words scrawled there sent me running from the funeral hall, clutching my daughter as if the devil himself were at our heels.
My name is Britney. A year ago, I was a thirty-year-old single mother, rebuilding a life from the ashes of a tragedy. My husband, the love of my life, was killed in a car accident when I was five months pregnant with Maddie. One ordinary morning he kissed me goodbye, told our unborn baby he loved her, and walked out the door, never to return. The grief was a fog I couldn’t see through. My mother, Roslin, and my older brother, Steve, became my anchors.
We had always been a tight-knit trio. My father died when I was young, and Mom raised us on her own. Steve, five years my senior, had sacrificed his own childhood to help, playing with me after school so I wouldn’t feel lonely while Mom worked. When I became a single mother before my child was even born, they didn’t hesitate. They insisted I move back into the family home.
There was only one complication: my sister-in-law, Sherry. Steve had married her a few years prior, a woman three years his junior with a quiet, unreadable demeanor. I barely knew her, and I worried she wouldn’t want a grieving, pregnant sister-in-law invading her home. To my surprise, she readily agreed.
And so, our new life began. With the unwavering support of my mother and brother, I gave birth to a beautiful, healthy baby girl. We named her Maddie, the name my husband and I had chosen together. Holding her, I felt a fierce determination to give her the world.
Raising a child alone was hard, but my family made it possible. Steve, who couldn’t have children of his own, adored Maddie. He spoiled her rotten, taking her to the park, buying her toys, and often insisting I take a break while he babysat. “Go out with your friends,” he’d say. “I’ve got this.”
Around her fourth birthday, Maddie developed an “imaginary friend.” She’d have long, animated conversations with empty spaces. Mom and Steve found it charming, a normal part of childhood development. Sherry, however, did not.
“You should have that girl exorcised,” she said once, her eyes filled with a strange revulsion as she watched Maddie chatter to an empty chair. She began to avoid my daughter, recoiling if Maddie came too close, even yelling at her once for touching one of her belongings. I wanted to confront her, but I was a guest in her home. I didn’t want to cause trouble for Mom and Steve, so I held my tongue.
Life settled into a new routine. I got an office job, and Maddie started preschool. The inheritance my husband left provided a comfortable cushion, but I was determined to secure Maddie’s future on my own terms. My days were a blur of work, daycare pickups, and quiet evenings at home. The strange warnings began on a holiday weekend.
“Why don’t we go out, just the three of us?” Steve suggested. It was unusual; he usually just took Maddie. I was surprised but pleased. At the department store, he bought Maddie a stuffed cat, his face beaming as she hugged it tightly. Later, at a coffee shop, his demeanor shifted.
“Hey, Britney,” he began, his expression uncharacteristically serious. “Have you noticed anything… strange happening lately? With you or Maddie?”
“Strange? Like what?”
“Anything,” he pressed. “Even the smallest thing that seems out of the ordinary.”
I wracked my brain. “No, I can’t think of anything.” The question was odd, but I dismissed it. The next day, my mother asked me the same thing.
“Britney, how are you these days? Is there anything unusual going on?”
“No, Mom. What is this about?” She just shook her head, a worried look in her eyes that she quickly tried to hide. I would later be haunted by my failure to press them for more.
A few days later, tragedy struck again. I had just picked Maddie up from daycare when my phone, set on silent, vibrated. It was Sherry.
“Britney,” her voice was a choked sob. “I just got a call from the police. Steve and your mother… they’ve been in an accident. They’re gone.”
My mind went blank. It was the same hollow, ringing emptiness I had felt when they told me about my husband. I hung up the phone, my body numb.
“Mommy, aren’t we going home?” Maddie’s small voice pierced through the fog. I forced a smile, patted her head, and drove to the hospital, a terrible, familiar dread settling over me.
They were lying on beds, side-by-side, looking as if they were merely asleep. “Are Grandma and Uncle Steve sleeping?” Maddie asked, her innocent question shattering the last of my composure. I collapsed, hugging my daughter, and cried until I had no tears left.
The funeral was two days later. I stood by the caskets, a robot in a black dress, accepting condolences from a blur of faces. Sherry stood beside me for a time, her face a mask of grief, but she kept a noticeable distance from Maddie. Halfway through the service, she mumbled that she wasn’t feeling well and slipped out of the venue. I didn’t think much of it. Grief manifests in strange ways.
It was then that I saw Maddie wander toward Steve’s casket. She was holding the stuffed cat he had bought her. She stood on her tiptoes, her small hands reaching inside. I rushed over, a cold panic seizing me.
“Maddie, no, honey.”
That’s when she pointed to the empty chair. “The man with the blue tie wants me to give this to you, Mommy.”
The blue tie. It was the one I had given my husband for our last anniversary. The one he was wearing the morning he died.
I took the folded paper from her small hand. My fingers trembled as I unfolded it. It was Steve’s handwriting, frantic and spidery. The first sentence made my heart stop.
The entire inheritance will be given to Maddie.
But it was the next words that made me run.
Britney, Sherry is not who you think she is. She’s after your husband’s inheritance. She made arrangements with dangerous people to have you removed from the picture. Your mother and I found out. We confronted her. I think she panicked. This was no accident.
I snatched Maddie into my arms and ran from the funeral hall, the note clutched in my hand. My mother and brother hadn’t died in an accident. They had been murdered. And I was supposed to be the original target.
The note was a confession from beyond the grave. Steve had discovered that Sherry, drowning in debt, had become obsessed with the substantial inheritance my husband had left me. She had found someone online, someone from a dark corner of the internet, and had arranged to have an “accident” staged for me. The fee was exorbitant. To pay for it, she was planning to embezzle funds from her part-time job.
My mother and brother had found his research, his notes, his will. When they confronted her, she must have realized her plan was unraveling. So, she accelerated it, changing the targets. She had silenced the only two people who knew the truth. Steve, in his final moments, must have hidden the note in his pocket, a desperate, final act to save me. And Sherry, in her arrogance, had tried to dispose of the evidence by placing it in his casket, assuming it would be cremated with him, a secret turned to ash.
The deep, gut-wrenching grief I felt for my mother and brother instantly morphed into a white-hot rage. I called Sherry’s employer and, without giving too many details, told them to immediately freeze her access to all company accounts. They were shocked but acted quickly, stopping her just before she could siphon the funds. Then, I called the police.
Sherry had vanished. Her belongings were still in our house, but she was gone. She was a fugitive, hunted not only by the law but likely by the dangerous people she had failed to pay.
As the police investigation unfolded, I thought of my mother and brother, who had died to save my life. A fierce anger burned within me, a desire for a vengeance that I knew they would not have wanted. I had to be strong, not for revenge, but for Maddie. She was all I had left.
A few days later, I took Maddie to visit my husband’s grave. I placed a bouquet of his favorite flowers on the cool stone and, on a whim, a still-warm hamburger from his favorite diner. As I closed my eyes to pray, Maddie’s small voice broke the silence.
“It’s delicious. Daddy says it’s good, too.”
“What, sweetie?”
“Daddy says the hamburger is good. The man with the blue tie was Daddy. When you were praying, he was eating the hamburger with me.”
I stared at my daughter, and for the first time in days, I laughed. A real, genuine laugh that came from a place deeper than grief. My husband, who had loved hamburgers with an almost religious fervor, was still here, a ghostly gourmand enjoying a meal with his daughter. It was absurd, and it was the most beautiful, comforting thought in the world.
He was still watching over us. He had sent Steve a warning, he had guided Maddie to the note, he had protected his family even from beyond the grave.
“From now on,” I said, looking at the headstone and then at the empty air beside my daughter, “I’ll bring you a hamburger every week. With Maddie.”
We are a family of three, still. A mother, a daughter, and a guardian angel in a blue tie. The grief is still there, a constant, dull ache. But it is tempered now by a profound sense of love, a love that transcends death, a love that saved us. My mother and brother are gone, but they did not die in vain. And Sherry, wherever she is, will never harm us again. We are protected.
