It didn’t take long to get to the mortuary, where the shirts and the ribbons securing them were removed from the coffins by the staff, allowing the coffins to be opened so that the family — as no fans or photographers were allowed in the mortuary, despite some efforts — could see the bodies within.
As a result, for only the second time in her life, Chloë found herself looking on a dead body, and for the first time on the dead body of someone who was too young to have simply died without an underlying cause, not that she personally felt like Papi had really been old enough to die without his underlying cause having existed.
The reposing expression on Tristan’s face didn’t look altogether unlike him, if Chloë was honest, as there seemed a stoic element to it, and it wasn’t like she’d not seen Tristan with an unsmiling face. It’d been more rare to see him with a smiling face, usually the best anyone got was a smirk.
His hair was well-styled, and Chloë recognised the suit he was wearing as one that he’d packed for his trip to Frankfurt, suggesting that the players’ luggage had been retrieved from the craft and the clothes which had dressed them had been chosen from there in order to have them be decent for their return trip home, where more formal arrangements on their attire could be made.
Finally his skin looked to be lighter than hers, but not naturally light, instead, it had a lightly greyish pallor to it that, along with his impossible stillness, made it clear that he was as dead as she’d been told he was.
Despite the fact that she was looking on his body, and didn’t dare touch it, as she didn’t want to know what it felt like, it still didn’t feel fully real that he was dead, and that he wouldn’t suddenly appear somewhere else.
As soon as Elle laid eyes on Tristan’s body she wailed as loudly as ever and cast herself across the still-closed bottom half of the coffin lid, with Amandine following suit momentarily.
Chloë turned away from the coffin, still without tears in her eyes, and almost startled violently at the suddenness of a thought that came to her mind, declaring that she ought to be the one in the coffin, not Tristan, as she was the one who’d wanted to leave the unhappy sham of a life they’d been living together.
She stared at the wall for a moment, trying to figure out where that kind of nonsense had come from before banishing it from her head with a firm shake. His remaining alive so she could divorce him was what she’d wanted, as that way the acting would’ve all been over, she still wanted to be alive, she just wanted to be done with all the faking.
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