No flowers for the dead - Chapter 49: Chapter 49
You are reading No flowers for the dead, Chapter 49: Chapter 49. Read more chapters of No flowers for the dead.
The invitation arrived in a white envelope embossed with gold.
The Geneva Global Summit on Women and Leadership.
Panel Topic: “Shaping Legacy: Women Who Changed the Story.”
Three seats reserved.
Three names printed in delicate, deliberate lettering:
Rae Thorne. Elara Thorne. Alina Wen.
No title.
No surname hierarchy.
Just their names.
Side by side.
⸻
They didn’t answer immediately.
Elara left the envelope unopened on her desk for two days.
Rae folded hers in half and shoved it in a drawer.
Alina stared at hers every morning over tea.
The memoir had already cracked the world open.
Did they really need to stand on stage and relive it?
“Do we owe them more?” Elara asked one night, glass of wine in hand.
“Maybe not,” Rae said. “But I think we owe it to her.”
She didn’t mean Ava Moreno.
She meant the unnamed girl who had written to them last week.
The one who said reading their story stopped her from returning to someone who had broken her.
Alina’s voice was quiet, but sure:
“Then we go. Not for the summit. For the ones listening quietly in the back.”
⸻
Geneva was cold in early March.
Crisp air. White sky. Wide streets lined with banners of faces—scientists, leaders, artists. And now, three women who were none of those things by profession, but all of them in the shape of their lives.
Backstage, the nerves returned.
Elara paced. Rae checked her notes. Alina, calm as ever, simply breathed.
Then their names were called.
They stepped out, one by one.
The applause began as polite.
By the time they sat down, it had swelled into something warmer.
Real.
⸻
The moderator asked the first question:
“How did you survive him?”
Rae’s answer was quiet.
“I didn’t survive him. I survived what the world expected me to be because of him.”
Elara leaned forward.
“I thought building an empire would save me. But it was telling the truth that set me free.”
Alina smiled, eyes soft.
“I loved a powerful man. But I only found my own power when I stopped trying to protect his legacy.”
⸻
They spoke for forty-five minutes.
They didn’t cry.
They didn’t apologize.
They let their story breathe—every jagged, beautiful inch of it.
And when the moderator closed the session with:
“What do you want people to remember about Elias Thorne?”
They answered together, not rehearsed, but true:
“Nothing. We want them to remember the women.”
The Geneva Global Summit on Women and Leadership.
Panel Topic: “Shaping Legacy: Women Who Changed the Story.”
Three seats reserved.
Three names printed in delicate, deliberate lettering:
Rae Thorne. Elara Thorne. Alina Wen.
No title.
No surname hierarchy.
Just their names.
Side by side.
⸻
They didn’t answer immediately.
Elara left the envelope unopened on her desk for two days.
Rae folded hers in half and shoved it in a drawer.
Alina stared at hers every morning over tea.
The memoir had already cracked the world open.
Did they really need to stand on stage and relive it?
“Do we owe them more?” Elara asked one night, glass of wine in hand.
“Maybe not,” Rae said. “But I think we owe it to her.”
She didn’t mean Ava Moreno.
She meant the unnamed girl who had written to them last week.
The one who said reading their story stopped her from returning to someone who had broken her.
Alina’s voice was quiet, but sure:
“Then we go. Not for the summit. For the ones listening quietly in the back.”
⸻
Geneva was cold in early March.
Crisp air. White sky. Wide streets lined with banners of faces—scientists, leaders, artists. And now, three women who were none of those things by profession, but all of them in the shape of their lives.
Backstage, the nerves returned.
Elara paced. Rae checked her notes. Alina, calm as ever, simply breathed.
Then their names were called.
They stepped out, one by one.
The applause began as polite.
By the time they sat down, it had swelled into something warmer.
Real.
⸻
The moderator asked the first question:
“How did you survive him?”
Rae’s answer was quiet.
“I didn’t survive him. I survived what the world expected me to be because of him.”
Elara leaned forward.
“I thought building an empire would save me. But it was telling the truth that set me free.”
Alina smiled, eyes soft.
“I loved a powerful man. But I only found my own power when I stopped trying to protect his legacy.”
⸻
They spoke for forty-five minutes.
They didn’t cry.
They didn’t apologize.
They let their story breathe—every jagged, beautiful inch of it.
And when the moderator closed the session with:
“What do you want people to remember about Elias Thorne?”
They answered together, not rehearsed, but true:
“Nothing. We want them to remember the women.”
End of No flowers for the dead Chapter 49. Continue reading Chapter 50 or return to No flowers for the dead book page.