Jay stared at the decrepit old corpse in the coffin.
Shortly after his granddaughter Lacey, the one who looked so much like Sarah, had come to visit him in prison and told him that she forgave him, Jay had starting coughing up blood. The next day, he started having trouble breathing.
In the past twenty thirty years he'd had brushes with his health, and each time he'd always gotten better. In the past fifty, ever since he'd been put behind bars for the third and final time, he was regularly targeted by other inmates. People who wanted to kill him. And each time, he survived. He was a survivor. He was going to live to a hundred if he could.
When he coughed up blood for the second day in a row and couldn't stop, he was taken to the prison hospital.
"We found a tumor in your brain. It's in your lungs. It's all over your body," the Doctors told him. "Three months at the most, Mr. Whitman."
It ended up being nine.
Nine months being treated by prison doctors who didn't know what they were doing. As the months passed, the crowds of press fighting their way into his hospital room. One reporter who managed to snap a picture.
In the end, he'd thought first of his mother. Then of Sarah. And then of his girls. Alexandra, Helen, Claire, living in the mountains. He'd been happy, and the world had tried to take that away from him.
After he'd died, there were newspaper headlines all over the world. "CULT LEADER AND CONVICTED KILLER JAY WHITMAN DEAD AT 87."
Cult leader? He'd often heard that used to describe his family, but that was a close minded way of looking at what they'd actually been.
There was a post on some kind of website -- he wasn't sure, he didn't use the internet much in prison -- where a user named Jennifer Wade uploaded an image of Margaret and her parents, Charlotte and David. All smiling and happy.
"Thinking of them today," she wrote. "Be kind to each other." A hundred thousand "likes."
Another girl called Caroline Goodwin posted a photo of Helen and Simon. "My pretty mama her first husband, Simon." A similar amount of likes.
The posts went on and on. They talked about him on the news, too. They couldn't forget him. They never would.
He was fucking immortal.
Jay took a deep breath.
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