Queen of Wild Cards novel Chapter 115

"Believe whatever helps you sleep at night. I'm not here to debate your career with you. Just tell me where my mother's ashes are.

All I want right now is to take her remains and leave. Nothing else matters. But if you're still planning on using her ashes as leverage to control me...

...then I promise you, you and your little family will be out on the streets begging for change by tomorrow morning. Think very carefully before you speak!"

Her mother was gone; holding onto grudges from the past felt pointless now.

As long as her mother's belongings were out of their greedy hands, as long as she got the real ashes back, and as long as they stayed out of her way, she wouldn't waste another second on them.

"Stella, I swear to you, I had no idea the urn didn't contain her ashes. I don't know why they turned into talcum powder.

I watched them wheel your mother's body into the crematorium with my own eyes. And when we held the funeral, you were the one who personally placed her urn beneath the headstone. Don't you remember?"

When it came to the ashes, Frederick looked genuinely baffled and completely lost.

How could perfectly fine remains turn into talcum powder?

"Of course I remember. I just don't know if you tampered with it when you dug it back up years later."

How could she ever forget that day?

The sky had been blanketed in heavy, oppressive gray clouds, eventually breaking into a freezing drizzle, as if even the heavens were mourning the fact that she was losing her mother at such a tender age.

She had placed the urn beneath the headstone with her own two hands. She had been soaked in the rain on the way back and ran a terrible fever for two days straight.

Frederick explained frantically, "Stella, what could I have possibly done? I didn't tamper with anything. I just retrieved the urn, that's it.

And I only went back to get it five years after she passed away! I admit, taking it was a despicable thing to do.

But why on earth would I swap out the ashes? If I had swapped them, I wouldn't have bothered throwing the urn into the doghouse in the first place, would I?"

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