I felt something go up in my chest that I have since had to sit with in a therapist’s office.
I was glad.
Then Bertrand Ozel went to the lectern.
He apologized for the interruption. He said that Ozel and Sons had held, since January of 2019, a pre-arranged and pre-paid funeral file in the name of Oswin Ellery.
Pre-arranged. Six and a half years ago.
He said that filed with those arrangements was a sealed envelope, with written instructions that it be opened and read aloud at the service, before the eulogy, in the presence of the family.
He said the envelope had been retrieved from their safe that morning and that he had only in the last few minutes confirmed with the family’s attorney that the instruction stood.
Then he said, “Mrs. Ellery has asked me to proceed.”
She had said no. That’s what the head shake was. She’d said no twice and then she’d closed her eyes and said yes, because a dead man had left a written instruction and she had spent six and a half years doing exactly what he asked.
He read it. It runs to two and a half pages and I have a copy and I am going to give you the parts that matter.
My father wrote it on the fourteenth of January, 2019.
Whatever you do about it now, do it fast. She’s forty-two and she gave me six years and she has nowhere to be at three o’clock this afternoon.
I loved your mother for forty-one years and I loved this one for six and I am not going to rank them for anybody’s comfort.
Look after her. She won’t ask.
Bertrand Ozel folded the pages up.
Nobody moved for a long time.
I looked at the front row and Seraphine Ellery was sitting perfectly straight with her hands in her lap and she was not crying at all, which of course she wasn’t, because she had done all of her crying in a house on Alder Street between 2019 and 2025 where nobody was looking.
Lucan got up and walked out of that building.
