Eleanor laughed so hard that the priest had to pause.
For a few precious minutes, she looked less like a terminally ill patient and more like a mischievous woman who had finally gotten away with something.
Seven days later, she was dead.
And at her funeral, her lawyer handed me an envelope and said six words that made my knees nearly buckle.
“Eleanor was not the woman you thought she was.”
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
To understand what happened that afternoon, you need to understand how I met Eleanor—and why a woman I had known for barely a year asked me to marry her.
My name is Daniel Carter. I was thirty-nine years old, unmarried, and working an ordinary job that paid the bills without giving me much to look forward to.
I had no wife waiting for me at home, no children arguing over the television, and no grand plans for the future.
