Beautifully Dead - Chapter 41

An Immortal Affections serialized novel

May 5, 2025
Fredericksburg, Virginia

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Amelia woke to the phone buzzing against the pillow.

She patted around until she found it, lifting it up until the screen’s light shone way too bright for this early in the morning.

She covered her eyes and gave herself a moment. Then looked again through narrowed lids, lowering her screen brightness to its lowest setting.

After another moment or two… maybe three, she squinted to see the offending message, which turned out to be two messages. The most recent from Dr. Merryweather,

Breakfast? I know a place that should still be open. Good coffee.

And one from Dr. Caulfield, timestamped 5:12 AM. almost hours ago.

Amelia’s own message sat above it—the one she’d sent at three in the morning, before the part of her brain that handled professional communication had woken up.

How long have you known Elijah Merriweather—and do you actually trust him?

Caulfield’s reply was longer than expected:

Not so early here, Dr. Everett. I have known Dr. Merriweather about six years. He approached me through a colleague at the Pasteur Institute regarding historical pathogen research. I was skeptical—I’m always skeptical of the private sector, but his foundation’s resources checked out, his methodology was sound, and his knowledge of viral epidemiology was extraordinary for someone without a formal medical background.

Trust is a strong word, I can say that I trust his commitment to this work. I trust that he wants the same outcome we do. And I trust that he’s carried something for a very long time that he doesn’t talk about, and that it drives everything he does.

He’s not an easy man to know. He withholds. But in six years he has never once lied to me about anything that mattered, not medically. I can’t say the same about most of my colleagues.

Amelia read the message three times. Caulfield had answered the question she’d asked. And some she had not on top of that.

He’s carried something for a very long time.

She picked up the phone and typed reply to Elijah: Where?

His reply came in under thirty seconds.

Tina’s Café. Around nine? They have good coffee.

Twenty past eight. Less than an hour.

Amelia typed: Fine.

Before she hit send, she changed it to: Yes.

She set the phone face-down on the nightstand and laid still, her pulse doing its new trick—concentrating low in her throat, a thickening she could feel when she swallowed. Morning light filtered through the curtains. The world was becoming more vivid. She saw tiny particles of dust and skin cells floating through the air. Every crack and fiber of the leather chair she had spent way too much time in lately. Things in the microscopic realm she shouldn’t be able to register at this distance, let alone in this detail.

The shower couldn’t find a temperature. Too hot, then too cold, then too hot again. She stood under the water with her palms flat against the tile, watching steam curl over her forearms, watching the overhead light break through water droplets.

She’d lost weight. She could see it when she wiped the mirror—the sharpening along her jaw, collarbones more prominent than a week ago. Nothing dramatic. Not yet. But her body was clearly overextended.

Watching her own fingers tremble and catch on the buttons of her shirt, for the first time she realized she might be about to die.

She was thirty-one years old, she wasn’t ready to die. She had work to finish. Letters and journals to study. A genetic test pending at a lab forty minutes away. Most importantly, she did not want to die.

She finished the buttons.

Three new WHO alerts on her phone since the shower. She didn’t open them—she didn’t have time.

She grabbed her sunglasses and bag and headed out the door.

-

Tina’s Café had one barista working. Mask up, she wiped down tables that would stay empty. Two of the four overhead lights were off. The dimness was a mercy—even with sunglasses on.

Eli had occupied the corner booth again. Back to the wall. One paper cup and a regular cup of coffee on the table.

“You came,” he said.

“You said good coffee.” She slid in across from him. The paper cup he pushed over was warm in her hands, and it felt right—one of the few temperatures her body still agreed with.

“How are you feeling?”

“Tired. Not much change. I’m documenting.” She took a sip. Dark, no sugar. He’d remembered. “Dr. Thanakit said to log everything. I’m logging.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I know.”

The barista’s cloth moved in circles across a table near the window. Outside, a delivery truck idled at the curb.

“The results should be back tomorrow,” Eli said. “Maybe the day after. The lab is running behind—they’ve got samples stacked from Boston.”

“I know.”

“Are you going to say anything other than ‘I know’?”

She looked at him over the rim of her cup. Grey henley, sleeves pushed to the elbows. He looked different this morning. Looser, yet tired, something she hadn’t seen on him before.

“I read everything again last night,” she said. “James Merriweather’s notes. All of them. But I believe there’s more of his papers out there somewhere. Do you know of any journals dated after March ‘62?”

His face didn’t change, but his attention did. “Not that I am aware of,” he lied as if it were second nature to him–which it had become. “And did you glean any new information?”

“I believe he documented Eleanor’s condition as if he knew exactly what was happening to her.” She set her cup down. “He wasn’t discovering her symptoms. He was confirming them. There’s a difference, and it’s in the sentence structure.”

Eli said nothing. His fingers rested on the table.

“I read correspondence for a living,” she said. “I know what discovery looks like in a letter—the hedging, the questions a writer asks themselves on the page, the places where they’re working through something new. Merriweather’s notes don’t do that. His clinical vocabulary is fully formed from page one. He already had the framework. He was filling in a case.”

“Eleanor’s case.”

“Eleanor’s case.” She held his gaze. “He knew what was going to happen to her. Maybe not the timeline. Maybe not the exact progression. But the mechanism—he understood it before it began.”

The café was quiet enough to hear the espresso machine ticking as it cooled. Elijah’s coffee sat untouched. He looked at it, then past it.

“My brother died when I was younger,” he said.

Amelia waited.

“I was old enough to understand what was happening. Not old enough to do anything about it.” His hand moved to his coffee cup, wrapped around it, but he didn’t lift it. “He was the good one. The one people wanted to be around. He could walk into a room and everyone in it felt like he was who they were waiting for.”

He paused, a tightening in his jaw.

“He got sick. In the way where you watch someone you know become someone you don’t, where the disease takes the person before it takes the body. And the people who should have helped—the ones who had the knowledge, who understood what was happening—they didn’t act. They documented. They observed. They kept their distance and waited.” His knuckles were white around the cup. “They let their caution cost him his life.”

Amelia didn’t move.

“I’ve spent a long time making sure something like that doesn’t happen again. To anyone. That’s the direction I pushed my family’s foundation since I took over. That’s what all our research is for. That’s what all of this is.” He gestured between them. “I know I haven’t told you everything, and that’s making it harder to trust me, and accept help from me. But I am asking you to trust me anyway.”

She watched his face. Looked for the tells—the micro-expressions that could give away a performance where a constructed story wobbles under pressure. She’d made a career out of reading dead men’s letters looking for the gaps.

She couldn’t find the gaps here.

“James Merriweather was a complex man,” Eli said quietly. “He made mistakes. But he’s not all there is to the family name. What I’ve spent my time on — what the Foundation has become — that’s not about vindicating him. It’s about making sure what happened to my brother never happens to anyone else.”

It didn’t answer her questions. It didn’t explain the gaps in his knowledge, the way he arrived at conclusions three steps ahead of her, the things he seemed to know before she told him.

But at least he wasn’t defending James. He was claiming distance from him.

“I’m not going to stop asking questions,” she said.

“I know.” A half-motion at the corner of his mouth. “That’s why I picked you.”

“You didn’t pick me. A lawyer called me about a house.”

“Amelia.”

“What?”

“Eat something.” He pushed a brown paper bag across the table. Inside: a scone, warm, wrapped in wax paper. The acrid smell of cranberry and orange. “You need to eat something. Your hands were shaking when you picked up that cup.”

She looked at the scone. Looked at him.

“It’s not hunger,” she said.

She unwrapped it and broke off a piece anyway. It tasted like nothing at first—the same flat blankness that had been ruining food for days. Then, underneath, sweetness. Faint, but there. She chased the flavour.

She ate the whole thing without speaking. He looked out the window while she did, watching the street, the delivery truck pulling away from the curb. She was grateful he didn’t watch her eat.

She wiped her fingers on a napkin. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

A silence. Different from the one before. Less guarded. Neither of them tried to fill it as she drank the rest of her coffee.

Eli could hold a silence longer than anyone she’d met. She often worked alone, so she relished the silence. It was nice sitting with someone without feeling the need for noise

But she had something she needed said, before she left.

“When the results come in,” she started. “I want to be there. Not to be told afterward, or be given a summarized version. I need to see them for myself.”

“I’ll make sure of it.”

“Great.” She got up, “I’ll see you then. Thank you for the coffee and scone.”

“You are welcome,” he smiled and nodded.

When she got back to the room, she lowered the blinds fully. The archival box sat on the desk where she’d left it. The faded blue of the ribbon tying the majority of Thomas’s letters almost invisible in the dimness.

She tapped the wood.

Eleanor had been twenty-three. Writing about her death, in a locked room, documenting her own change. Trusting in James Merriweather because he was the only one who understood what was happening to her. Because he was the only one there.

Amelia opened her laptop. The WHO dashboard loaded slowly. Edinburgh: 5,112 confirmed. Two hundred and sixty-five overnight. Leeds and Manchester still climbing. A new cluster in Oslo.

She closed the dashboard and magnified her symptom log.

May 5, 2025. 10:47 AM.

Photophobia persistent, worsening. Scotopic adaptation now exceeds functional threshold—can read document text in near-total darkness. Fine motor tremor, intermittent. Appetite suppression continues. Managed one scone at breakfast—first significant food intake in approximately 36 hours. Taste perception altered: baseline flat affect with intermittent recognition of sweet/salt. Weight loss estimated 4–5 lbs since onset. Temperature dysregulation ongoing. Energy pattern unchanged: peak alertness 11 PM–3 AM.

Her cursor blinked at the end of the notation.

Emotional state: complicated.

She deleted that. Typed it again. Then deleted it again.

She looked at the box again. Thomas’ letters.

She’d put everything back, but at the bottom of the box, still unbound, were the ones she hadn’t touched yet: letters from late 1862. She’d been so absorbed in James’s documentation she hadn’t gotten to them.

Her cursor blinked at the end of the symptom log entry.

Eleanor had trusted James Merriweather. She had died in a locked room and woken up different, and Merriweather had been standing there when she opened her eyes.

Amelia was not Eleanor. And this was not 1862. She had contracts and lawyers and friends and colleagues. She was not alone. She was not trapped.

Still, she was sitting in a dark room, getting sicker and sicker, trusting a Merriweather to stand beside her.

As an historian, she appreciated the irony.

-

to be continued…

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© 2025-26 E.M. di V. - writing as Morgan A. Drake & Joe Gillis. All rights reserved.