He Buried Me, But I Bloomed

She was dead. Or at least, that's what they thought. Now, five years later, Ivy Richardson stood at her own grave, ready to face the man who put her there.

Ivy, in a custom coat, stood at her cold, black marble gravestone. "Beloved daughter and fiancée," the inscription read—a cruel joke mirroring her heart's wasteland.

A gravedigger dropped his shovel, face ashen. Trembling, he pointed, gasping, "Oh my God... you look exactly like her." He saw a ghost; Ivy was alive.

She paid for silence. Then, Clayton, her former fiancé, appeared, shaking: "Ivy? Where have you been?" She crushed his cheap lilies, her lethal gaze replacing the girl he'd abandoned.

He snarled, blaming her, justifying her "Do Not Resuscitate" order for his mistress, Ainsley. Ivy's cold laugh mocked his pathetic lies.

"Fiancé?" she echoed, revealing her new wedding ring. "That title expired when you signed the DNR... and Ainsley was watching, wasn't she?" With an icy "Go to hell," Ivy left him slipping in the mud.

Chapter 1

Ivy Richardson POV:

I stood before the massive slab of polished black marble, the collar of my custom dark trench coat turned up against the biting Los Angeles wind. The heavy fabric felt like armor, a necessary defense mechanism to shield the violent churning in my stomach.

A sudden gust of cold wind swept through the desolate cemetery, violently kicking up a swirl of dead, brown leaves around my expensive leather boots. The barren, decaying landscape perfectly mirrored the absolute wasteland inside my chest.

My gaze locked onto the gleaming gold letters meticulously carved into the stone: *Here lies our beloved daughter and fiancée.*

Those words were heavy, suffocating shackles that had bound me for my entire miserable life.

A cold, twisted smirk pulled at the corner of my lips. I felt sick to my stomach.

Beloved. The word tasted like battery acid on my tongue. Where was this profound love five years ago when I was bleeding out on a sterile hospital bed, completely abandoned by every single person who claimed to care about me?

I slowly raised my hand. I was wearing pitch-black leather gloves, the supple material clinging tightly to my skin.

I never took them off in public. They were the only thing hiding the jagged, ugly scars carved deep into my wrists—the permanent physical reminder of the night I finally broke.

Through the thin layer of expensive leather, my fingertips lightly traced the freezing surface of the headstone. The stone was solid, unyielding, and dead.

Just like the old Ivy. I was confirming that the weak, pathetic girl buried beneath this dirt was gone forever.

The harsh, grinding roar of a lawnmower engine suddenly shattered the oppressive silence of the graveyard.

I turned my head slightly. A middle-aged white gravedigger in stained, heavy-duty work clothes was driving a small utility cart down the gravel path toward my section.

He parked the cart a few yards away, the engine idling loudly, and grabbed a dirty metal shovel from