Her Heart Beats Inside Me

Evelyn told her boyfriend she had found a rich man and left him. What she had actually done was borrow at high interest to cover the surgery his failing heart needed, then give him her own heart anonymously and have a cheap artificial one fitted in her chest. He never learned any of it, and he spent three years angry about being walked out on. She went by herself to the snow mountain the two of them had meant to see together. A storm closed the road, the artificial heart stopped working, and she did not come back down. Three years on she is given three days above ground as a walking corpse, enough time to arrange her own funeral. She stands at the roadside for a lift to the funeral home and the car that picks her up is his. He is the richest man in the city now and his fiancée is in the seat beside him. The fiancée takes against her at once and spends the drive finding ways to humiliate her, and he goes along with it. Neither of them notices the corpse marks coming up on her skin or how much worse she is getting by the hour.