As I woke up that night, the first thing I noticed was the emptiness beside me. The hotel room was dark, painted with thin lines of moonlight filtering through the curtains. Ryan, my new husband, wasn’t holding me like he had fallen asleep doing just hours before.
Instead, he was turned away, his broad back slightly hunched, his arms wrapped protectively around something small and wooden.
Initially, I believed he was cradling the Bible from the nightstand—odd, but harmless. After that, when my eyes adjusted, I realized it was a box. A dark, polished wooden box about the size of a shoebox.
He was whispering to it. My stomach tightened. “Ryan?” I said softly.
He froze. Then, slowly, he turned his head toward me, his face pale in the moonlight. “You’re awake,” he murmured.
“I couldn’t sleep. It’s… it’s her.”
“Her?” I echoed. He hesitated, then sighed.
“It’s Claire. My ex. The one who died.
I—uh—I brought her ashes. It felt wrong to leave her behind.”
Silence filled the room like cold air. My mouth went dry.
We’d only been married three days. He must have seen my face, sihe added quickly, “It’s just a comfort thing. She was a big part of my life.
I’ll put it away. Don’t be weird about it, okay?”
Yet as he finally drifted off to sleep again, the sound of his slow breathing mixing with the crash of distant waves outside our Maui suite, my mind wouldn’t quiet. My husband had brought another woman’s ashes to our honeymoon.
The morning that followed, he got up early to shower. I stared at the box on the bedside table, still glistening faintly from the morning light. My heart thudded.
Curiosity and dread wrestled inside me until I couldn’t stand it anymore. I lifted the lid. Inside wasn’t ashes.
There was a folded stack of letters tied with twine, a worn photograph of a blonde woman smiling beside Ryan, and—my blood turned to ice—a flash drive, labeled in neat handwriting: “Do Not Show Her.”
Her? I played it on my laptop. The first video opened to Claire—alive, staring into the camera.
“If you’re watching this,” she said, “then Ryan did it again.”
My hands shook. That was the moment I knew: I had to get out
My hands trembled so hard the laptop almost slid off the bed. The video continued, Claire’s eyes steady, her voice quiet but sharp.