A Buried Story

A Buried Story

IN THE BACK-LEFT corner of the Days Gone Funeral Home, underneath a loose floorboard, there was a metal box with a bunch of old journals inside. To anyone who found them, the scribbles looked like some teenager venting her sexual frustrations with Lestat or that one guy from The X-Files.

And, if you didn’t mind ghosts and vampires and blood oaths and leather pants and true love, the stories were quite good.

You could wonder why someone would shove journals full of smutty fan fiction underneath the floorboard of a century-old funeral home, but never question the mind of a teenager. You wouldn’t get very far.

I hid them there because—well—I just did, okay? Because when I left for college, I wanted to bury that part of me—that dark, weird Addams Family side—and what was a more fitting place than a funeral home?

And I almost succeeded, too.

1

The Ghostwriter

EVERY GOOD STORY has a few secrets.

At least, that’s what I’ve been told. Sometimes they’re secrets about love, secrets about family, secrets about murder—some so inconsequential they barely feel like secrets at all, but monumental to the person keeping them. Every person has a secret. Every secret has a story.

And in my head, every story has a happy ending.

If I were the heroine in a story, I would tell you that I had three secrets.

One, I hadn’t washed my hair in four days.

Two, my family owned a funeral home.

And three, I was the ghostwriter of mega-bestselling, critically acclaimed romance novelist Ann Nichols.

And I was sorely late for a meeting.

As the doors closed, a graying man in a sharp business suit eyed the plant in question.

The man coughed into his hand and angled himself away from me. The woman on the other side said, as if to console me, “That’s lovely, dear.”

Which meant that this was a terrible gift. I mean, I figured it was, but I had been stranded for too long on the platform waiting for the B train, having a small panic attack with my brother on the phone, when a little old lady with rollers in her hair tottered by selling cacti for like a dollar a pop and I bought things when I was nervous. Mainly books but—I guess now I bought houseplants, too.

The guy in the business suit got off on the twentieth floor, and the woman who held the elevator left on the twenty-seventh. I took a peek into their worlds before the doors closed again, immaculate white carpet or buffed wooden floors and glass cases where old books sat idly. There were quite a few publishers in the building, both online and in print, and there was even a newspaper on one of the floors. I could’ve been in the elevator with the editor for Nora Roberts for all I knew.

Whenever I came to visit the offices, I was always hyperaware of how people took one look at me—in my squeaky flats and darned hose and too-big plaid overcoat—and came to the conclusion that I was not tall enough to ride this ride.

Which . . . fair. I stood at around five foot two, and everything I wore was bought for comfort and not style. Rose, my roommate, always joked that I was an eighty-year-old in a twenty-eight-year-old body.

Sometimes I felt it.

Nothing said Netflix and chill quite like an orthopedic pillow and a wineglass of Ensure.

When the elevator doors opened onto the thirty-seventh floor, I was alone, grasping my cactus like a life vest at sea. The offices of Falcon House Publishers were pristine and white, with two fluorescent bookshelves on either side of the entryway, touting all of the bestsellers and literary masterpieces they’d published over their seventy-five-year history.

At least half of the left wall was covered in books by Ann Nichols—The Sea-Dweller’s Daughter, The Forest of Dreams, The Forever House, ones my mom sighed over when I was a teenager writing my smutty Lestat fanfic. Next to them were Ann’s newer books, The Probability of Love, A Rake’s Guide to Getting the Girl (I was most proud of that title), and The Kiss at the Midnight Matinee. The glass reflected my face in the book covers, a pale white and sleep-deprived young woman with dirty blond hair pulled up in a messy bun and dark circles under tired brown eyes, in a colorful scarf and an oversized beige sweater that made me look like I was the guest speaker at the Yarn of the Month Club and not one of the most distinguished publishing houses in the world.

Technically, I wasn’t the guest here. Ann Nichols was, and I was what everyone guessed was her lowly assistant.

And I had a meeting to get to.

I stood in the lobby awkwardly, the cactus pressed to my chest, as the dark-haired receptionist, Erin, held up a finger and finished her call. Something about salad for lunch. When she finally hung up, she looked up from her screen and recognized me. “Florence!” she greeted with a bright smile. “Nice to see you up and about! How’s Rose? That party last night was brutal.”

I tried not to wince, thinking about Rose and I stumbling in at 3:00 A.M. “It sure was something.”

Erin laughed. Then she glanced around the lobby, as if looking for someone else. “Is Mrs. Nichols not going to make it today?”

Erin shook her head. “Gotta wonder what it’s like, you know? Being the Ann Nicholses and Stephen Kings of the world.”

I tugged down the multicolored scarf wrapped around my mouth and neck. While it wasn’t winter anymore, New York always had one last kick of cold before spring, and that had to be today, and I was beginning to nervously sweat under my coat.

I laughed. “I’ve told you before—a Craigslist ad.”

I shrugged. “C’est la vie.”

Erin was a few years younger than me, her Columbia University publishing certificate proudly displayed on her desk. Rose had met her a while back on a dating app, and they’d hooked up a few times, though now from what I heard they were strictly friends.

The phone began to ring on her desk. Erin said quickly, “Anyway, you can go ahead—still remember the way, yeah?”

And I was left to my own devices.

I knew where to go, because I’d visited the old editor enough times to be able to walk the halls blindfolded. Tabitha Margraves had retired recently, at the absolute worst time, and with every step closer to the office, I held tighter on to the poor cactus.

Tabitha knew I ghostwrote for Ann. She and Ann’s agent were the only ones who did—well, besides Rose, but Rose didn’t count. Had Tabitha passed that nugget of secrecy to my new editor? God, I hoped so. Otherwise this was going to be an awkward first meeting.

The hallway was lined with frosted glass walls that were supposed to be used for privacy, but they provided extraordinarily little of that. I heard editors and marketing and PR shadows talking in hushed tones about acquisitions, marketing plans, contractual obligations, tours . . . reallocating money from one book’s budget to another.

The things in publishing that no one ever really talked about.

Publishing was all very romantic until you found yourself in publishing. Then it was just another kind of corporate hell.

I passed a few assistant editors sitting in their square cubicles, manuscripts piled almost to the top of their half walls, looking frazzled as they ate carrots and hummus for lunch. The salads Erin ordered must not have included them, not that editorial assistants made enough to afford eating out every day. The offices were set up in a hierarchy of sorts, and the farther you went, the higher the salary. At the end of the hall, I almost didn’t recognize the office. Gone were the floral wreath hanging on the door for good luck and the stickers plastered to the frosted glass privacy wall that read TRY NOT, DO! and ROMANCE ISN’T DEAD!

For a second, I thought I’d made a wrong turn, until I recognized the intern in her small cubicle, stuffing ARCs—Advance Reader Copies, basically rough drafts of a book in paperback form—into envelopes with a harried sort of frenzy that bordered on tears.

My new editor didn’t waste any time peeling off those decals and tossing the good luck wreath in the trash. I didn’t know if that was a good sign—or bad.

Toward the end of her tenure at Falcon House, Tabitha Margraves and I butted heads more often than not. “Romance believes in happy endings. Tell Ann that,” she would say, tongue in cheek, because, for all intents and purposes, I was Ann.

And I could see right through the lie.

Love was putting up with someone for fifty years so you’d have someone to bury you when you died. I would know; my family was in the business of death.

Tabitha called me crass when I told her that.

I said I was realistic.

There was a difference.

I sat down in one of the two chairs outside of the office, the cactus in my lap, to wait and scroll through my Instagram feed. My younger sister had posted a photo of her and my hometown mayor—a golden retriever—and I felt a pang of homesickness. For the weather, the funeral parlor, my mom’s amazing fried chicken.

I wondered what she was cooking tonight for dinner.

Lost in my thoughts, I didn’t hear the office door open until a distinctly male voice said, “Sorry for the wait, please come in.”

I bolted to my feet in surprise. Did I have the wrong office? I checked the cubicles—the brown-haired workaholic intern cramming ARCs into envelopes to the left, the HR director sobbing into his salad on the right—no, this was definitely the right office.

The man cleared his throat, impatiently waiting.

I hugged the cactus so tight to my chest, I could feel the pot beginning to creak with the pressure, and stepped into his office.

And froze.

The man in question sat in the leather chair that for thirty-five years (longer than he’d been alive, I figured) Tabitha Margraves had inhabited. The desk, once cluttered with porcelain knickknacks and pictures of her dog, was clean and tidy, everything stacked in its proper place. The desk reflected the man behind it almost perfectly: too polished, in a crisp white button-down shirt that strained at his broad shoulders, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows to reveal rather intimidatingly sexy forearms. His black hair was swept back out of his long face and somehow accentuated his equally long nose, black square glasses perched on it, and there were very faint freckles speckled across his face: one by his right nostril, two on his cheek, one just above his thick right eyebrow. A constellation of them. For a second, I wanted to take a Sharpie and connect them to see what myth they held. The next second, I quickly came to the realization that—

Oh.

He was hot. And I’d seen him before. At publishing functions with Rose or my ex-boyfriend. I couldn’t place the name, but I’d definitely run into him more than once. I held my breath, wondering if he recognized me—did he?

For a second, I thought so, because his eyes widened—just a fraction, just enough for me to suspect he knew something—before it vanished.

He cleared his throat.

No. No, Florence. Bad girl, I scolded myself. You do not want to climb him like a tree, because he’s your new editor and therefore very, incredibly, stupendously unclimbable.

The edges of his mouth quirked up. “So you said.”

I quickly pulled my hand away, mortified. “Oh god. Right—sorry.” I sat down a little too hard in the uncomfortable IKEA chair, cactus planted firmly on my knees. My cheeks were on fire, and if I could feel them, I knew that he could see I was blushing.

He sat down again and adjusted a pen on his desk. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. Sorry for the wait, the subways were hell this morning. Erin keeps telling me not to take the B train and yet I am a fool who does every single time.”

He barked a laugh. “Maybe both.”

I bit the inside of my cheek to hide a smile. He had a great laugh—the kind that was deep and throaty, like a rumble.

Oh no, this was not going as planned at all.

He liked me, and he wasn’t going to like me in about five minutes. I didn’t even like myself for what I was here to do—why did I think a cactus as a gift would make this easier?

He scooted his chair in and straightened a pen to be horizontal with his keyboard. Everything was neat like that in this office, and I got the very distinct feeling that he was the kind of person who, if he found a book misplaced at a bookstore, would return it to the shelf where it belonged.

Everything had its place.

He was a bullet journal guy, and I was a sticky note kind of girl.

That might’ve been a good thing, actually. He seemed very no-nonsense, and no-nonsense people were rarely romantic, and so I wouldn’t get a pitying look when I, eventually, tell him that I no longer believed in romance novels and he would nod solemnly, knowing exactly what I meant. And I would rather have that than Tabitha Margraves looking at me with those sad, dark eyes and asking, “Why don’t you believe in love anymore, Florence?”

Because when you put your hand in the fire too many times, you learn that you only get burned.

My new editor shifted in his seat. “I’m sorry to hear that Mrs. Nichols couldn’t make it today. I would’ve loved to meet her,” he began, wrenching me from my thoughts.

I shifted in my seat. “Oh, Tabitha didn’t tell you? She never leaves Maine. I think she lives on an island or something. It sounds nice—I wouldn’t ever want to leave, either. I hear Maine’s pretty.”

Are you sure you aren’t half moose yourself? my traitorous brain said, and I winced because that was very wrong and very bad. “I guess they prepared you for the rats in New York.”

He laughed again, this time surprising himself, and he had a glorious white smile, too. It reached is eyes, turning brown to a melting ocher. “Nothing could prepare me for those. Have you seen the ones down in Union Square? I swear one had a jockey on him.”

I snorted a laugh and looked away—anywhere other than at him. Because I liked his charm, and I definitely didn’t want to, and I hated disappointing people, and—

He cleared his throat and said, “Well, Miss Day, I think we need to talk about Ann’s upcoming novel . . .”

I gripped the cactus in my lap tighter. My eyes jumped from barren wall to barren wall. There was nothing in the office to look at. It used to be full of things—fake flowers and photos and book covers on the walls—but now the only thing on the walls was a framed master’s degree in fiction—

Surprised, he cocked his head. “This . . . is a romance imprint.”

He was quiet for a moment. “You mean a tragedy.”

He pursed his lips.

The words were like a slap in the face. I quickly snapped my gaze back to him, and went very still. His eyes had lost their warm ocher, the laugh lines having sunk back into a smooth, emotionless mask.

I gripped the cactus tighter. It had suddenly become my buddy in war. So he didn’t know that I was Ann’s ghostwriter. Tabitha didn’t tell him, or she forgot to—slipped her mind, whoops! And I needed to tell him.

He was my editor, after all.

But a bitter, embarrassed part of me didn’t want to. I didn’t want him to see how much of my life I didn’t have together because, as Ann’s ghostwriter, shouldn’t I? Have it together?

Shouldn’t I be better than this?

When I was growing up, my mother read Ann Nichols’s books, and because of that, I did, too. When I was twelve, I would sneak into the romance section in the library and quietly read The Forest of Dreams between the stacks. I knew her catalog back and forth like a well-played discography of my favorite band.

And then I became her pen.

While Ann’s name was on the cover, I wrote The Probability of Love and A Rake’s Guide to Getting the Girl and The Kiss at the Midnight Matinee. For the last five years, Ann Nichols had sent me a check to write the book in question, and then I did, and the words in those books—my words—had been praised from the New York Times Book Review to Vogue. Those books sat on shelves beside Nora Roberts and Nicholas Sparks and Julia Quinn, and they were mine.

I wrote for one of romance’s greats—a job anyone would die to have—and I . . . I was failing.

Perhaps I’d already failed. I’d just asked for my last trump card—to write a book that was anything, everything, but a happily ever after—and he said no.

He pressed his lips into a thin line. He had a sort of wide mouth that dipped in the middle, expressing things that the rest of his face was too guarded to. “How much time does she need?”

A year. Ten years.

An eternity.

His dark brows shot up. “Absolutely not.”

No, absolutely not. “Yes . . . ?” I ventured.

I knew that part. Molly Stein, Ann’s agent, wasn’t very happy to get a call about the book in question. She thought everything had been going smoothly. I hadn’t the heart to tell her otherwise. Molly had been pretty hands-off with my ghostwriting gig, mostly because the books were part of a four-book deal, this being the last one, and she trusted that I wouldn’t mess up.

Yet here I was.

I didn’t want to even think about how Molly would break the news to Ann. I didn’t want to think about how disappointed Ann would be. I’d met the woman once and I was deathly afraid of failing her. I didn’t want to do that.

I looked up to her. And the feeling of failing someone you looked up to . . . it sucked as a kid, and it sucked as an adult.

Benji went on. “Whatever is keeping Mrs. Nichols from finishing her manuscript has become a problem not only for me, but for marketing and production, and if we want to stay on schedule, we need that manuscript.”

The legal department. That meant a breach of contract. That meant I would have messed up so big that there would be no coming back from it. I would’ve failed not just Ann, but her publisher and her readers—everyone.

I’d already failed like that once.

The office began to get smaller, or I was having a panic attack, and I really hoped it was the former. My breath came in short bursts. It was hard to breathe.

I shoved my panic into a small box in the back of my head, where everything else went. All of the bad things. The things I didn’t want to deal with. The things I couldn’t deal with. The box was useful. I shut everything in. Locked it tight. I pressed on a smile. “Oh, no. I’m fine. It’s a lot to take in. And—and you’re right. Of course you’re right.”

He seemed doubtful. “Tomorrow, then?”

I looked down at the succulent, all but forgotten in my lap as my panic banged on the box in my head, lock rattling, to get free. I—I thought I hated this man, and if I stayed in this office any longer, I was going to either throw this cactus at him or cry.

Maybe both.

I jerked to my feet and put the succulent on the edge of the desk. “It’s a gift.”

Then I gathered my satchel and turned on my heels and left Falcon House Publishers without another word. I held myself together until I stumbled out of the revolving door of the building and into the brisk April day, and let myself crumble.

I took a deep breath—and screamed an obscenity into the perfectly blue afternoon sky, startling a flock of pigeons from the side of the building.

I needed a drink.

No, I needed a book. A murder-thriller. Hannibal. Lizzie Borden—anything would do.

Maybe I needed both.

No, definitely both.

2

The Breakup

IT WASN’T THAT I couldn’t finish the book.

I just didn’t know how.

It’d been a year since The Breakup—everyone has at least one in their lives. You know the one, right? The kind of breakup from a love you thought would last your entire lifetime, only to find your heart ripped out with a spork by your former lover and placed on a silver platter with FUCK YOU written in ketchup. It’d been a year since I’d hauled my luggage out into the rain on that shitty April evening and never looked back. That’s not the part I regretted. I will never regret ending things with him.

I just regretted being the kind of girl who fell for someone like him in the first place.

The time had crawled by after that. At first, I had tried to get up every day and sit down on the couch with my laptop and write, but I couldn’t. I mean, I could—but every word felt like pulling teeth, and every one of those words I deleted a day later.

It was like one day I knew how to write; I knew the scenes, I knew the meet-cutes and the swoony moments, exactly how the hero tasted when my heroine kissed him . . . and then the next day, it was all gone. Iced over in a blizzard, and I didn’t know how to thaw out the words.

I couldn’t remember when I stopped opening up the Word document, when I stopped trying to look for a romance between the lines. But I did, and now I was here between a rock called despair and a hard place named Benji Andor.

Absently, I brushed my fingers along the spines of the books at McNally Jackson, a bookstore nestled in the thick of Nolita. I followed the rows of titles and last names around to the next aisle—romance—and quickly moved on to sci-fi and fantasy. If I didn’t look at them, they didn’t exist.

I never imagined being a ghostwriter. Hell, when I first got my agent and sold my first book, I thought I’d be invited to literary panels and I thought I’d go to book events, and I thought I had finally found the door to the stairs that would take me up and up and up into my forever career. But the door closed as quickly as it opened, and sent an email saying, “We regret to inform you . . . ,” as though my book flopping was my fault. As though me, a girl with a nonexistent social media following, less money, and almost no connections, was responsible for the fate of a book published by a multimillion-dollar company with every resource and connection available to it.

Maybe it was my fault.

Maybe I hadn’t done enough.

And anyway, I was here now, writing for a romance author I’d only ever met once, and I was about to screw that up, too, if I couldn’t finish the damn book. I knew the characters—Amelia, a smart-talking barista with dreams of being a music journalist, and Jackson, a stability-shirking guitarist disgraced from the limelight—trapped together on vacation on a small Scottish isle when their Airbnb host accidentally double-books the property. The isle is magical, and the romance is as electrifying as the storms that roll in from the Atlantic. But then she finds out that he lied to her about his past, and she lied to him, because while the booking was indeed happenstance, she decided to use it to try to win over an editor at Rolling Stone.

And I guessed the plot hit too close to home. How could two people reconcile and trust each other when they fell in love with the lies the other person told them?

Where did you go from there?

Last time I tried to write that scene—the reconciliation one, the one where they face each other in a cold Scottish storm and pour their hearts out to try and repair their damage—lightning struck Jackson dead.

Which would’ve been great if I ghostwrote revenge fantasies. Which I didn’t.

I began to nose through the used J. D. Robb section when my phone started to vibrate in my satchel. I dug it out, praying it wasn’t Ann Nichols’s agent, Molly.

It wasn’t.

My brother laughed. “I take it your meeting didn’t go well?”

My brother snorted. “Fine, fine—so what’s the situation? Was he hot?”

I pulled out a book that did not belong in political thriller—Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston—and decided to walk it back to the romance section where it did, in fact, belong. “Okay, we have two situations.”

I groaned. “I did! And then he didn’t give me another extension on my novel. I have to finish it. And it has to have a happy ending.”

He guffawed. “He said that?”

I wanted to strangle him through the phone. Carver was the middle of the Day siblings and the only one who knew I ghostwrote—and I made him swear to secrecy or I’d print all of his embarrassing middle-grade fanfic starring Hugh Jackman in the town paper. Friendly sibling blackmail and all that. He just didn’t know whom I ghostwrote for. Not that he didn’t constantly guess.

I made my way into the romance section, half-naked men glowering down at me from their shelves, and slipped the book into the M section.

Carver asked, “So, I hate to be that person, but what’re you going to do about that manuscript?”

I could hear Carver frowning in his voice. “How did you know I was at the funeral home?”

I made a disapproving noise. “Mom says he keeps refusing to go see Dr. Martin.”

Alice was really good at getting Dad to do things he didn’t want to do. She was the youngest of us, and she had Dad tied around her pinkie so tightly, just the mere thought of upsetting her would drive him to pull down the moon if he had to. She was also the one who decided to stay in the family business. She was the only one who wanted to.

In the background, I heard Dad yell, “Convince who? Of what?”

And Carver replied, covering the receiver to shout back (not that it helped my eardrums), “Nothing, old man! Go drink your Ensure! Hey—I was joking—oh, what’s that, Mom? I should come help you with something? Sure! Here’s your second favorite—”

I heard a scuffle on the other end of the phone as Carver very quickly handed it over to Dad. I could imagine the exchange—Carver tossing his cell phone to Dad as Dad tried to swat him in the arm and missed to catch the phone, and Carver slinking away into one of the other rooms after Mom, laughing the entire way.

Dad raised the phone to his ear, and his bold, boisterous voice boomed through. “Buttercup! How’s the Big Apple?”

My heart swelled at the sound of his voice, chorused with Carver laughing away in the background. I missed my family, more than I really cared to admit most days. “It’s good.”

I could almost hear him roll his eyes. “I’m fine. These old bones haven’t quit on me yet. How’s my eldest doing? Found a nice catch in the city yet?”

I snorted. “You know my life is more than who I date, Dad. Love isn’t everything.”

For some reason, the angular face of my new editor came to mind. Yeah, right. I ran my thumb over the pages of one of the books in my lap, feeling them buzz softly. “How’s the family business?”

I swallowed the knot in my throat because anyone else hearing that would’ve thought he was crazy. Maybe he was a little crazy, but if he was, then I was, too. “Did he now?”

He laughed, but there was a little bitterness there. One that we both shared. It was why I left, after all. Why I didn’t stay in Mairmont. Why I went as far as I could, where no one knew my story.

As it turns out, when you solved a murder at thirteen by talking with ghosts, the newspapers printed exactly that.

LOCAL GIRL SOLVES MURDER WITH GHOSTS

You can imagine how that sort of thing could haunt you. I wasn’t exactly the popular kid in high school, and after that I didn’t stand a ghost of a chance of being asked to prom. Carver and Alice couldn’t see them, and neither could Dad’s younger sister Liza, or Mom. It was only the two of us.

We were the only ones who could understand.

Another reason why I was better off alone.

I sighed, more out of resignation than regret. “Love you, Dad.”

He hung up, and I finally noticed the bookseller glaring at me for sitting on the stool. I popped up and quickly apologized for taking up real estate, and scurried off toward the cash register.

One of the only good things to come out of this writing gig was the fact that I could write books off on taxes. Even if I never read them. Even if I used them to build book thrones and then sit down and cry on them while pouring myself glass after glass of merlot.

It was still worth it.

And the small hit of serotonin did make me feel a little less murderous. Tucking the books into my backpack, I left for the closest station that would take me back to Jersey. It was about a twenty-minute walk up to the Ninth Street station, but the afternoon was sunny and my coat was heavy enough to protect me from the last biting chill of the season. I liked the long walks in New York. It used to help me work through a plot inconvenience or figure out a scene that never quite worked, but all my walks in the last year couldn’t jostle my brain into creating again, no matter how far I went. Not even today, on the eve of everything coming unraveled.

At Ninth Street, I descended into the bowels of the subway. It was much hotter in the station than outside, and I unbuttoned my coat and tugged down my scarf to keep myself cool as I took the steps down two at a time to the platform.

The train pulled up to the platform and the doors dinged. I elbowed my way into the packed car, shoved myself up against the far door, and hunkered down for the long ride. The train began to move again, rocking gently back and forth, and I stared out of the door window as light after light passed.

I didn’t pay attention to the shimmering transparent woman standing a few people away, somehow inhabiting a free space. She kept looking at me, intently, until the train pulled up to the next station, and I sat down in a newly empty seat and pulled out one of the books I’d bought.

My dad would’ve hated what I just did. He would’ve told me to give her a chance. To sit down, to listen to her story.

All they wanted, usually, was for someone to listen.

But I ignored the ghost, as I had done for almost a decade in the city. It was easier when you were surrounded by people. You could just pretend like they were another faceless person in the crowd. So I pretended, and as the PATH train crossed under the Hudson River to Jersey, the ghost flickered—and was gone.

3

Dead Romance

I DRAINED MY glass of wine and poured myself another one.

I used to be good at romance.

Every one of Ann Nichols’s new novels had been praised by fans and critics alike. “A dazzling display of passion and heart,” the New York Times Book Review called Midnight Matinee, and Kirkus Reviews said A Rake’s Guide was “a surprisingly enjoyable romp”—which, hey, I’ll take as positive. “A sensational novel from a well-loved storyteller,” Booklist wrote, and never mind all of the blurbs from Vogue and Entertainment Weekly and a million other media outlets. I had them all posted on my dream board in my room, cut out from magazines and email chains over this last year, hoping that seeing them all together could inspire me to write one last book.

Just one more.

I was good at romance. Great at it, even. But I couldn’t for the life of me write this one. Every time I tried, it felt wrong.

Like I was missing something.

It should’ve been easy—a grand romantic gesture, a beautiful proposal, a happily ever after. The kind my parents had, and I’d spent my entire life looking for one just as grand. I wrote them into novels while I looked for my real-life equivalent in men at bars wearing sloppy ties or wrinkled T-shirts, and strangers who stole glances at me on the train, bad idea after bad idea.

I just wanted what my parents had. I wanted to walk into a ballroom dancing club and meet the love of my life. Mom and Dad weren’t even assigned to each other as dance partners until their respective partners both came down with the flu, and the rest, they say, was history. They’d been married for thirty-five years, and it was the kind of romance that I’d only ever found again in fiction. They fought and disagreed, of course, but they always came back together like a binary star, dancing with each other through life. It was the small moments that tied them together—the way Dad touched the small of her back whenever he passed her, the way Mom kissed his bald spot on the top of his head, the way they held hands like kids whenever we went out to dinner, the way they defended each other when they knew the other was right, and talked patiently when they were wrong.

Even after all of their kids moved out, I heard they still cranked up the stereo in the parlor and danced across the ancient cherrywood floors to Bruce Springsteen and Van Morrison.

I wanted that. I searched for that.

And then I realized, standing in the rain that April evening, almost a year ago exactly—I’d never have that.

I took another gulp of wine, glaring at my screen. I had to do this. I didn’t have a choice. Whether it was good or not—I had to turn in something.

The evening was soggy, and the cold rain struck through her like a deathly chill. Amelia stood in the rain, wet and shivering. She should’ve taken her umbrella, but she wasn’t thinking. “Why are you here?”

Jackson, for his part, was equally as wet and cold. “I don’t know.”

Nighttime on the Isle was supposed to be magical, but tonight’s rain was especially cold and heavy. Amelia’s clothes clung to her like a second skin. She wrapped her jacket around herself tighter, to shield against the biting cold.

Jackson said, his breath coming in a puff of frost, “I didn’t think the ice queen could get cold.”

She punched him.

And I couldn’t write this fucking scene.

I was a failure, and Ann’s career was dead in the water.

There was little more depressing than that, save for the state of my refrigerator and cabinets. All that we had left was dino-shaped mac and cheese. Perfect depression food, at least. As I pulled the box from the cabinet, my roommate burst in through the door, slinging her purse down on the couch.

She was the kind of person who demanded to be looked at—the kind who could walk into a room and command it with a single look. She knew what she wanted, and she always went for it. That was her mantra. “You see it, you reach for it.”

That might’ve been why she was so successful at the advertising firm where she worked. Only two years in, and she was already the social media marketing manager.

Rose shoved another carrot into her mouth. “Only if we don’t get caught.”

I shrugged. “Grind up the body. Host a barbecue. Feed the remains to your office. There, done.”

Rose cocked her head. “Did it work?”

She sighed and shook her head, twisting the carrot bag closed and shoving it back into the refrigerator. “No, no. I don’t want to risk food poisoning innocent people. I’ve got a better idea.”

The water began to boil. I stirred the pot with a spatula, since everything else was dirty. “Do you mean arsenic or . . . ?”

I gave her a baffled look. Me, standing in our kitchen, making deadline mac and cheese in my comfy flannel pajama bottoms and an oversized Tigger sweater, no bra, and yesterday’s hair. “Out . . . ?”

I groaned. “No, Rose, please, let me stay in and eat my mac and cheese and die. Alone.”

I couldn’t argue with that. But I did not have cats, and I did not want to go out drinking, either. I ripped open the powdered cheese packet. “My bank account is about as lacking as my love life. I couldn’t even afford a Natty Light, Rose.”

She gave a loud sigh and took the packet from my hand, scooting the boiling pot of noodle water onto an off burner. “We’re going out. We’re going to have fun. I need fun, and I know you do, too. I’m sensing, from the mac and cheese, that the meeting with your editor didn’t go well today, did it?”

Of course it didn’t. Why else would I be making depressing mac and cheese? I gave a shrug. “It went fine.”

I exhaled through my mouth. “Ann has a new editor. I think you might know him or something—he seems familiar. His name is Benji something or other. Ainer? Ander?”

Rose gawked. “Benji Andor?”

I pointed at her with the wooden spoon. “That’s it.”

I gave her an exhausted look. She knew exactly where I was a year ago. Making depressing mac and cheese for a different reason.

She waved her hand dismissively. “Anyway, it’s nice to see he’s still in publishing, but at Falcon House’s romance imprint? Wow.”

I shrugged. “He probably likes romances? Do I know any books he worked on over at Elderwood?”

Rose put the packet of powdered cheese back into the box. “The Murdered Birds? The Woman from Cabin Creek?”

I stared at my roommate. “So . . . gothic murders?”

I gave Rose a look. “Do you even know what happens in Jane Eyre?”

I groaned and put my face in my hands. “No, and if I don’t turn it in, he’s getting legal involved. And then the cat’s out of the bag! Hi, I’m the ghostwriter! But I can’t even do ghostwriting properly, and then they’ll start wondering where Ann is, and then some really grizzled detective will come around questioning me and then everyone’ll start wondering if I murdered Ann Nichols—”

I sighed. “I couldn’t. You should’ve seen the way he looked at me when I asked to write a sad romance instead. It was like I killed his favorite puppy.”

My shoulders drooped. “Yeah. Now can I please eat my mac and cheese and wallow in my despair?”

Rose’s face turned to stone. “No,” she said as sharply as her cat eyeliner, and grabbed me by the wrist and dragged me out of the kitchen and down the hallway to our bedrooms. “C’mon. We are going out. We are forgetting our worries. We are going to conquer this stupid, loud, exhausting city tonight! Or die trying!”

At the moment, I’d rather have died.

Rose’s closet was full of fashion. It was a runway in our apartment. Beautiful sparkly dresses and soft blouses and pencil skirts with a slit just low enough to be work appropriate. Rose took out a short black dress, the one she had been trying to make me wear for at least a month now, and finally her evil plan was coming to fruition.

I shook my head. “No.”

She frowned. Narrowed her eyes. And said—

My eyes widened at the word. “Don’t you dare,” I whisper-warned.

I glared at her. She smirked, crossing her arms over her chest, triumphant.

I threw up my arms. “Fine! Fine. I will only do this if you promise to do the dishes for the next month.”

We shook on it.

Somehow, I had the feeling that she got the better end of the deal, and my suspicions were confirmed when she said, “Now get naked and put this on. We’re going to get you in trouble tonight and find you some inspiration to kiss.”

To forget that I had failed at the one thing I was ever good at. To pretend like tomorrow wasn’t the last day of the best career of my life. To be someone else for a while.

Just for a night.

Someone who didn’t fail.

4

Fated Mates

ROSE WAS LIKE an encyclopedia of the night. She knew exactly what restaurant had the best deconstructed burger, and which warehouses housed the most recent silent rave. (And how to get there.) She knew which cellar jazz bars made the best sidecars and the best diner for 3:00 A.M. hangover cures and the cheapest cocktails at the local artisanal bar where the next Franzen lamented about not having the time to pen his Great American Novel. She came from a small town in Indiana, with only a duffel bag and money stuffed into her shoes, and somehow, she’d made New York City her home in a way I never could.

I think it was the stars. I missed the stars too much. Especially the way they looked from the brick steps of my parents’ front porch.

There really wasn’t a sight like it.

There also wasn’t a sight like whatever murder back alley Rose led me to that night. There were three streetlights, and every single one of them flickered like they were all auditioning for the world’s most cliché horror movie. I followed Rose down the narrow alley, one hand stuck in my purse, around my pepper spray.

She snorted. “I don’t know how many times I have to tell you that it’s fake.”

The almost-hidden door gave a creak and swung open to reveal a tweed-dressed grad student with small round glasses and gelled-back hair. Rose motioned with her head for us to go inside, and I followed her.

I didn’t know what I expected, but it definitely wasn’t a narrow low-lit bar with wooden round tables. It was crowded, but everyone was whispering, as if they didn’t want to break the mood, so it was surprisingly quiet. Rose found us a table near the back, a single flickering candle in the center. At the front of the bar, where we came in, there was a stage with a microphone and a single amp. The crowd was a strange amalgamation of tweedy-professor types and boho artists who painted themselves naked and pressed their tits to a canvas to make art. Some of those art pieces were on the walls, actually.

She rolled her eyes. “A bar, Florence. It’s a bar.”

I looked for a menu on the table, or maybe it had fallen to the ground—but there wasn’t one. “I’m definitely not cool enough for this.”

Rose put a hand on my arm, giving me a warning look, because the last time we’d gotten drunk on Everclear was in college and it had been dumped into a tub of Jungle Juice. Neither of us remembered how we’d gotten from Bushwick to the Lower East Side that night, but some mysteries were better left unsolved.

I shifted uncomfortably at the table, feeling so incredibly out of my element in a too-tight black dress, ordering a too-expensive cocktail, in a quiet hole-in-the-wall bar full of people who probably all were so much cooler than me. I was half-afraid someone would come up and ask for my artistic credentials, and when I took out my Costco card and a cardboard-printed membership to a smutty book club—

Well.

Much like with Ben Andor, I feared I was not tall enough to ride this ride.

Rose slipped a credit card out from her glittery silver clutch and handed it to the bartender. “Put everything on this, please.”

The bartender took her card with a nod and left. Everything? How long were we going to stay? I guessed it didn’t matter anymore, did it? We could stay all night, or only a few minutes, and I would still wake up tomorrow not knowing how to write that scene. The bartender returned with two very fancy drinks named the Dickinson, and Rose held hers up to cheers with me. I stared at her like she was no longer my roommate, but an alien entity who had assumed my dear Rose’s smokin’-hot body. She gave a one-shouldered shrug. “What? It’s a Mastercard.”

We clinked our cocktails together. The drink tasted like strawberries and awfully expensive gin. Definitely not the ten-dollar handle I used to buy at the bodega in college. This stuff was dangerous. I took a larger gulp as a woman in a brown shawl stood from one of the tables near the front and made her way toward the microphone.

Rose took another sip of the Dickinson. “Sorta.”

Before Rose could reply, the woman in the brown shawl leaned in toward the microphone and said, “Thank you all for staying with us through our break. Now, for our next reading, I’d like to welcome Sophia Jenkins,” she said in a soft voice that reminded me of a patient kindergarten teacher.

People snapped as she relinquished the mic and a brown-skinned woman with short gray hair came up to the microphone and took out a journal.

The woman’s short story was about a fish in the ocean who dreamed of being a siren, or maybe she was a siren who thought she was a fish. It was beautiful, and simple, and the entire bar had quieted to listen.

When she was done, everyone snapped politely.

I didn’t realize I needed that until this moment. Just quiet art, spoken to quiet people to appreciate. No secrets. No exchange. No expectations. “You’re a really good friend, Rose Wu.”

She grinned. “You’re right, and any good friend would tell you to go up next.”

I hesitated, but it didn’t sound like a terrible idea, when all day writing had felt like pulling teeth. The artisanal Dickinson helped. I could go up there. I could read something that I jotted down on my phone a while back. I could put a little bit of creativity into the world that seemed to want to suck it from your very marrow.

I could go up there and be someone—anyone—other than Florence Day tonight.

Because Florence Day would be curled up on the couch with a bowl of mac and cheese, her laptop balanced precariously on a pillow on her lap, trying desperately to write a story she didn’t believe in. Because storybook love only existed for a lucky few—like my parents. They were the exception to the rule, not the rule itself. It was rare, and it was fleeting. Love was a high for a moment that left you hollow when it left, and you spent the rest of your life chasing that feeling. A false memory, too good to be true, and I’d been fooling myself for far too long, believing in Grand Romantic Gestures and Happily Ever Afters.

Those weren’t written for me. I wasn’t the exception.

I was the rule.

And I guess I finally understood the kinds of lies I told people with my witty prose and promise of a happy ending. I promised them that they were the exception. And every time I looked at that blinking cursor in my Word document, trying to unite Amelia and Jackson, all I could see was my reflection on the screen.

The reflection of a liar.

But for one night—one moment—I didn’t want to be that girl I saw in the reflection of my computer screen. I wanted to go back. To pretend that there was true love waiting for me somewhere out in the world. That souls separated by space and time could come crashing together with the force of a single kiss. That the impossible was not quite out of reach. Not for me.

That there was love, true and fierce and loyal, in a world where like called to like . . . and I was no longer the rule.

Where I was the exception.

As if the universe answered, I stood when the emcee called for another volunteer, another person to bare their heart. And so did someone else. Someone near the front of the bar, where the tables were so tightly packed the tweed suits blended together.

I froze.

The man in question turned to see who else had volunteered. Our eyes met. I knew then that it was him.

I could recognize him anywhere.

Even after a hundred years, after I’d scrubbed my brain of everything he was, I would know him.

Platinum-blond hair and a loose-cut V-neck and tight jeans and a birthmark just below his left ear in the shape of a crescent moon that I had kissed so many times my lips hurt just thinking about all of the nights I rubbed them raw, trying to forget about it. About him.

It was the universe telling me that I couldn’t forget. That if love was true, then love was a lie. That I had been happy once, happy then, but not happy forever. Because that wasn’t my story. That even my stories weren’t mine.

Perhaps they never were.

5

Dead Serious

THE FIRST TIME I met Lee Marlow, I was at a party with Rose and Natalie, our other roommate, who had since moved to South Korea. The party consisted of a lot of publishing people, though it wasn’t a mixer. There were authors, editors, quite a few assistants, and agents. It was for some milestone, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember what. They all blended together after a while, party after party, book launch after book launch, swanky bars after rooftop restaurants after extravagant apartments in Midtown.

I had grabbed Rose by the upper arm and brought her close. “Oh my god, four o’clock. Red Vans. I told you I could’ve worn my Converses.”

She inclined her head. “And I don’t regret it for a second.”

I did, however, regret it a few hours later when my feet had gone from numb to stabbing pain. The party was in someone’s swanky Midtown apartment, and while most people were in the living room or on the balcony, I had hobbled my way into the library and sank down on the leather high-back chair that probably cost more than my NYU tuition, and taken off those priceless Louboutins, and I never felt more relief in my life. I leaned back in the plush leather chair and closed my eyes, and basked in the quiet.

Rose thrived on parties, on the energy, the loudness, the people. I liked them sometimes—on special occasions, like at concerts or Comic-Cons, but there was nothing quite like the silence of a well-loved library.

My eyes flew open and I sat up straight—only to find the man in the red Vans sitting on one of those ridiculous bookshelf ladders, the autobiography of some dead poet in his hands. It was like a scene from one of those cheesy nineties rom-coms—light streaking in between the dark velvet curtains, painting his face in angles of pale moonlight.

I felt myself blushing even before I registered how picturesque he looked. It was his eyes, I think. When he looked at me, the world around us blurred. All I saw was him, and all he saw was me. And he saw me. It felt like one of those moments I wrote about in romances, one of those destiny-calling feelings, where like called to like. And I knew—I knew—I was the exception to the rule.

He noticed my shoes abandoned by the chair. “Bold of you to take your shoes off in a stranger’s house.”

He studied my shoes. “They do seem to be rather pointy.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Are we flirting or is this a game of Clue?”

He did that thing—the thing people did sometimes when they ran their tongue over their teeth, just under their lips, to hide a smile. “Which do you want it to—”

I wondered who she was. His girlfriend, perhaps? Fiancée? She was beautiful, with blunt-cut bangs and a loud yellow jacket, paired with high-waisted tartan-print trousers. I later came to find out that she was his assistant editor before he left Faux, where he had steadily climbed the ladder for years.

If the man in the red Vans had gone with her, things would have been so, so different. But he glanced back at me, a smile tucked into the corner of his mouth, and said, “I’ll be there in a minute.”

And then we were alone again.

He watched her go, setting his drink on the mahogany bookshelf—that should’ve been my first warning sign, a blatant disregard for someone else’s books—and came over to me. I felt my chest constrict; I wasn’t sure if I’d rather be left alone with my painful feet or if I wanted him to stay.

He snorted a laugh. “Anywhere else?”

I inclined my head. “Are you asking?”

I should’ve told him to leave. I should’ve said I needed to stay and keep an eye on Rose. But I didn’t know, and he looked at me with this genuine sort of curiosity—who could this girl be, in Louboutins and a discount black dress? And he was a mystery, too, in his red Vans and his loose brown suit and his wild blond hair.

He outstretched his hand to me, as if wanting me to take it. “I’m Marlow—Lee Marlow. C’mon, let’s go somewhere shoes aren’t required.”

I smiled at him, and I knew then—I just knew—that this was something special. I felt like a star that had come unhinged from the night sky and started to fall, and I couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t want to.

This was the moment. The one we’d tell at dinner parties. Of how we met, and fell in love, and knew we’d grow old together, and even when we died it wouldn’t be the end. Because if there was one thing more powerful than death itself, it was true, undeniable love.

I could feel it in my bones.

I just wanted to talk to him, to breathe in his words, to understand what made his brilliant mind tick.

I was, as the French say, une putain d’idiote.

And that was how I, the girl perpetually used as the backup date, who would rather hide in a burrito of blankets and watch trashy reality TV on a Friday night, began to date one of the hottest men I had ever met in my entire life.

But as I got to know him, as the dates turned into months, turned into anniversaries and sweet kisses, I thought it was the kind of love story worthy of my family’s legacy. A romance novel in the real world. It had the perfect meet-cute, the most charming love interest, and the most beautiful setting—a brownstone in Park Slope with a rooftop garden where I would sneak out and write chapters upon chapters of whimsical words.

Sometimes he would find me up in the garden and ask in that smooth tenor of his, “What’re you doing up here, bunny?”

And I’d close my laptop or my journal or whatever I was using to write that evening, and smile at him, and say, “Oh, just thinking up stories.”

It always made me shiver.

He laughed into my hair and murmured, “Nothing’s perfect, bunny,” and kissed me so softly, I would’ve called him a liar if my lips weren’t preoccupied, because this was damn near perfect. The way the evening light crept over the rooftop, orange and golden and dreamy, and how his fingers were gentle as he cupped the sides of my face.

This was perfect. He was perfect.

Even so, I kept my ghostwriting secret.

There was never a right time to tell him, I felt, because every time a book he edited hit the list, I had been on there for a few weeks more. It felt like lying, even though I had signed NDAs and bundled myself in cautionary tape.

And so, because of that, I told him everything else. I laid my heart bare to him because I wanted to make up for the one secret in my life I didn’t know how to vocalize. I told him all of my other secrets, and my nightmares, and finally—after a year of kisses and dates and promises we always intended to keep—as we sat on the couch watching Portals to Hell, I confessed, “They don’t really like people yelling at them to appear.”

He gave me a strange look over his black-framed glasses. “Ghosts? Like the haunting kind?”

I nodded, swirling my wine around in my glass. “Dad and I’ve danced with them in the funeral parlor.”

He took off his glasses and turned to me on the couch. “You . . . you’re saying you saw ghosts? Like actual spirits. The”—he wiggled his fingers in the air—“wooooo kind?”

He was chewing on the inside of his cheek, as if to keep himself from laughing, and I felt my heart sink then. Some things you just couldn’t tell even the people you loved the most. Some things no one would ever understand. Could never understand. And Lee was giving me the look I’d seen every day in high school, that pitying look, verging on curious, wondering if I was crazy.

I grinned then, and kissed him on the mouth. “Ha, what do you think of my story?” I asked, shoving down the part of me that began to fracture. The part I could never—would never—share with anyone again. “It’s a book I’m working on.”

More lies. But close to the truth. Truer than I’d ever been with anyone outside of Mairmont. But somehow, it still made me feel ashamed. And alone. I drained the rest of my glass and started to get off the couch, but he took me by the wrist and pulled me back down onto the cushions again.

I paused. “Really?”

Always the perfect words at the perfect time. He was good at that. He knew how to make you feel important and cherished.

So, I took a deep breath and I started. “She knew she would see a ghost when the crows came.”

And that was how I told him about the part of my life I couldn’t.

I told him about the ghosts of my childhood, and how rare they really were—some years without any at all. I’d seen a few in the city, but I never stopped to ask if they wanted anything. I didn’t really have it in me anymore, not after what I went through in Mairmont. I wanted to get away from that life—that part of me. And the best way to do it was to ignore them.

I never should have told him anything. I shouldn’t have even pretended that they were a story.

My younger sister, Alice, always said I was too gullible. Too generous. Too like the tree in that picture book, who kept giving and giving until there was nothing left. She said one day it would come back to bite me in the ass.

Lee Marlow did like to bite, but never my ass, and anyway I loved him, and he loved me, and we had a brownstone in Park Slope and he kissed me with such intensity that any echo of doubt fell silent between our lips. I might have been that weird girl who saw ghosts, but to him I was perfect.

Once he said, while we were out to dinner together and I had just told him about the time I had been woken up by the ghost of the recently deceased mayor, “You should try to publish this story. You might just make millions off it.”

He had barked a laugh. “Well, that’s because you wrote a romance.”

I faltered. “Better . . . ?”

I didn’t know what to say. Honestly, I should’ve said something—anything—to rebuke him, but then if I did, he would ask how I knew, and I’d have to tell him that I ghostwrote for Ann Nichols. By then, we were two years into our relationship, and he knew I was always writing something, but I’d been sneaky enough to keep him oblivious. So I pressed on a smile and said, “I don’t know. I kind of like keeping this story to myself.”

Maybe if I’d pressed him, he’d have given up the ghost, too.

For the record, he never told me about the book he was writing. He didn’t tell me until it sold at auction for a million dollars—exactly what he said mine would sell for. It sold to his own publishing house. Where he was a senior editor. And when I read the deal report, I realized it didn’t tell me anything.

Gilligan Straus, at Faux Publishing, has acquired in a twelve-house auction world rights to Faux senior editor Lee Marlow’s untitled debut, and a second novel. William Brooks of AngelFire Lit brokered the deal.

And Lee wouldn’t tell me, either.

And now he was successful.

I should’ve been happy—no, I was happy.

Genuinely.

Then one night, a few months after the deal, he left his computer open while he went to go pick up his laundry. I’d never snooped before—I never wanted to. I trusted him.

I was a fool.

Because he’d taken what he’d said to me to heart. That if I didn’t write the story that I wove for him, then someone else would.

I just didn’t think . . . I didn’t think it’d be him.

Three years and a day after I met Lee Marlow, I realized that I had gotten our story all wrong. I was the main character, but not in my own story.

I was the main character in his.

I was sewn into the pages, into every word, laced into every sentence. The book he sold was a book about my family’s funeral home. About the stories I’d told him. The ghosts. The funerals. The graves. The bullies who picked on me and called me Wednesday. Who poured ink on my hair. The memories of my parents dancing in the parlor late at night, when they thought their kids had gone to bed. Of me and my sister fighting over the urn of our grandmother, and the ashes scattering all over the floor. Of the stray cat named Salem who must’ve been hit by a car at least once a year and never died—until cancer took him fourteen years later.

It was all there. All of my secrets. All of my stories.

All of me.

He used me as inspiration, and then he just used me.

He used the book deal to quit his job, become a full-time writer, and when I confronted him about the story, he said to me—and I’ll remember it until the day I die—“Bunny, you can still write your romance.”

And maybe, yeah.

Maybe I was, but—

His demeanor changed then. He was still charming, still looked at me like I was the center of the universe in which everything else orbited, but suddenly I was something that was no longer precious. “I can’t steal a story you’d never write, Florence.”

And that was it. I had been an utter fool. Whatever I felt was nothing, it was imagined.

Then he shut the door on me.

Literally.

He didn’t even try to explain or beg for me to come back. He simply left me on the sidewalk on a cold April evening with my one jumbo suitcase and two pots of devil’s ivy I’d stolen from the rooftop garden.

And all of his stories began to make sense if I thought of them the same way he thought about my stories.

Fictional.

I thought I knew Lee. He had studied at Yale, and left because he wanted to teach French to orphans in Benin. He only came back because his mother died of cancer, and he wanted to help his father grieve. He had a sister in a group home in Texas after she suffered a brain aneurysm on her wedding day, and he always donated to the ASPCA because he used to volunteer there in high school, and I ate all of it up like candy. I never questioned it.

Why would I? I trusted him.

I began to figure it out, though, after the night he left me in the rain. I put together his lies, piece by piece, until they finally began to add up. I mean, he didn’t even know the capital of Benin. (It’s Porto-Novo, by the way.)

Here was the truth: Lee Marlow flunked out of Yale. His parents lived in Florida, and his sister was married to a librarian in Seattle. He never chased a master’s at Oxford. He never interned at the Wall Street Journal.

And I was heartbroken.

Standing there on the sidewalk in the April rain, I did the only thing I could think of—I called Rose, and she had a roommate who was moving out. It did cross my mind to go home, of course it did, because with one big hug from my parents I would be okay again, but if I went back home, it meant that everyone who said I wouldn’t make it in New York, who expected me to return so they could whisper behind their hands about the girl who talked to ghosts, would be right. And that was a story I couldn’t face. Not yet.

So, I showed up on Rose’s doorstep that rainy Wednesday evening, and that was that.

I haven’t been able to write a romance since.

6

The Death Toll

I HADN’T SEEN him since that rainy April evening. I’d tried not to think about his blue eyes, or his artfully disheveled blond hair, or how his calloused fingers felt when they touched me—

Suddenly, the bar seemed much too small. The walls were closing in. I couldn’t stay here. What was I doing? I was Florence Day, and Florence Day didn’t live her life like this. She didn’t share her stories—whether they were real or not—she didn’t wear tiny black dresses, and she didn’t drink artisanal drinks named after dead poets.

The universe reminded me of that.

Rose saw Lee Marlow a split second after I did, and I heard her whisper, “Shit. We can go if you want—Florence?”

I tore my gaze away from Lee Marlow and made my way toward the back of the bar, where the bathrooms would be. The emcee welcomed Lee up to the microphone, and he introduced himself, and said he would be reading from—from—

A few months? That soon? This past year, time seemed to slip through my fingers like sand. How could it be a year already and still my heart hurt this much? I could barely breathe. I didn’t watch where I was going. I just knew I needed to leave, and I needed to leave now—

But the line to the women’s bathroom was ten people long. That was at least thirty minutes. And I felt the tears at the corners of my eyes burning. I couldn’t wait.

And I refused to break down where Lee could see me.

I wouldn’t.

Beyond the women’s bathroom was a glowing emergency exit sign, and I took it as a girl in a sparkly purple dress asked if I was okay. “No,” I mumbled truthfully, slipping past the line to the emergency exit, and burst out into the cold April air.

I had to breathe. I had to calm down. So I did. I filled my lungs up with so much frigid air, I felt they might burst, then I let it out again. And again. I tilted my head back and blinked the tears out of my eyes, hugging myself tightly so I wouldn’t rattle apart. Not here. Not anywhere.

Never again.

I hated that I cried when I was angry, or upset, or annoyed. I hated that I cried at the slightest flux of emotional nuance. I hated how helpless I felt. I hated how I wanted to both march up to him and give him a fistful of my thoughts and run as far away from him as I could.

I hated how I couldn’t do both.

I spun toward the man—and froze. A tall shadow sulked against the brick wall. He quickly pocketed his phone and stood straight, making himself even taller, and with my eyes already blurry with tears, he looked like a shadowy nightmare.

Oh no. Narrow, darkly-lit alley. No one around. My life spinning out of control.

This was where I got murdered.

He paused. “Come again?”

He sounded baffled. “Why would I want to do that?” He stepped out of the shadows, and I could see his face finally. And that made it all the worse. It was a murder-y stranger, but not of the life kind. He was the kind to murder a career. My career.

Benji Andor.

And worse yet, he could see my face now, too. His thick eyebrows knit together. “Miss Day?”

Why—why did he have to be here of all places? I had half a mind to turn around and go back inside but . . . Lee would still be reading from that stupid book. I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to remember it existed. I just wanted to disappear.

I pressed the palms of my hands against my eyes and took a deep breath. It’s okay, Florence. Calm down. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter—

Then his voice, soft and a little hesitant, asked, “Is there anything I can do?”

No.

Yes.

I didn’t know.

I wanted to get away from Lee Marlow and his words. I wanted to get away from his memory. Everything about him—because he reminded me that I only had myself to blame. And I didn’t want to remember that. I didn’t want to remember any of it. My heart still felt like it was freshly broken, shattering all over again, the jagged pieces falling deep into the pit of my stomach like fresh pains.

And I didn’t want to feel that anymore. It had been a year. Why wasn’t I over him? Why did I still want him to look at me like I was the only story he wanted to learn (irony, that one), and tuck my hair behind my ear, and kiss me like I was the heroine in a romance, and tell me I was loved? That he loved me.

I missed that the most. I missed it so much, the closeness, the certainty that I mattered.

And I wanted to matter again.

To someone, to anyone.

For a moment.

He made a surprised noise, jolting me to my senses. I quickly jerked away. “Oh my god—I’m so sorry. I—I didn’t . . . I wasn’t . . . I usually don’t do this.”

He gave a snort that sounded like laughter. “Did it help?”

My lips still felt wet and tingly, and he tasted like a rum-and-Coca-Cola sort of dead poet (Lord Byron?), and I didn’t mind. I gave a nod. “But it doesn’t mean anything,” I added quickly. “It doesn’t—this doesn’t mean—I’m not going to fall in love with you.”

And his mouth found mine again. He pressed me up against the side of the wall, and kissed me like I hadn’t been kissed in—well, at least a year. The night was cold, but he felt like a furnace. I curled my fingers around the collar of his dark coat and pulled him closer. As close as I could. His hands were warm as his fingers came up to cradle the sides of my face, and we danced in the dark alley while standing still.

We didn’t talk. We didn’t think—or I, at least, didn’t think. Not about Lee Marlow, or the book due, or anything else, even though Ben didn’t even know it was me doing the writing. I wasn’t his author. Not the one who was going to turn the book in late; Ann was. He thought I was her assistant. The middleman. No one.

I wanted to be no one for a moment.

He broke away, breathless. “Miss Day?”

Oh. Was it? I just noticed. It was my Mom’s ringtone. That struck me as odd through the haze of kissing Benji Andor. Why was she calling this late? It was late, wasn’t it? I untangled my fingers from his coat and dug for my phone in my crossbody purse. He still hovered over me, bent near, shielding me against the world, and it was . . .

Nice.

It was nice in a way few things had been tonight.

When I found my phone, I realized I had over twenty missed calls from my mom—

And Carver.

And Alice.

Please call Mom, Carver’s text read.

Wait—what? Why?

I was more confused than anything else. It was 11:37 P.M. Was something wrong with Mom? The funeral parlor?

Something was off.

It was off before she said anything.

And then—

The dread in my stomach bloomed into a sickly, cold flower. “Is he okay? What hospital is he at? I can—I can be there on the first flight in tomorrow and—”

Gone.

The word was so quiet, I barely heard it. Or maybe my heart, thundering in my ears, was too loud. But whatever it was, the word didn’t register, not really, not for a long, long moment. And then, like the cold wind, it burrowed deep into my bones, and I could feel my heart beginning to crack. Right down the center, breaking off all the pieces of me that were my father, all of the memories—the late nights in the funeral home, when I couldn’t sleep because of a thunderstorm, when the wind howled between the cracks in the house and made them moan, so I’d quietly go down to the kitchen and get myself some milk, and sometimes I’d see Dad there at the kitchen table. He would be sitting there, watching the trees outside of the window bend in the storm.

Lightning lit the skies, making the thin summer trees look like bony skeleton hands reaching up toward the clouds. I curled myself up against my dad, who was sturdy and round and safe. I always felt safe with his arms around me, where nothing bad could ever get me. He was the kind of man who gave the best bear hugs. He put his whole heart into them.

I shook my head, because all I heard was the wind howling, and the bushes outside scraping against the side of the house. And it was terrible.

He hugged me tighter. “Your grandma—my mother—told me once that the wind is just the breath of everyone who came before us. All the people who’ve passed on, all the ones who’ve taken a breath—” And he took a breath himself, loud and dramatic, and exhaled. “They’re still in the wind. And they’ll always be in the wind, singing. Until the wind is gone. Do you hear them?”

And he tucked his head down by my ear, and rocked me gently back and forth, humming a strange and soft tune, and when I strained to listen, I could start to hear it, too—the dead singing.

As I shuffled out of the alley to sit on the curb, numb, a breeze swept an empty potato chip bag across the ground. I watched it go, but I didn’t hear any sort of music. I heard my name. “Florence?”

I glanced back, though my eyes were blurry, and all I could see was a massive hulking shape. He came closer, and knelt to me, putting a hand on my shoulder before I realized who it was.

Ben Andor.

Right. He was here. I’d been kissing him. I wanted to forget and now—

I shrugged his hand away and stumbled to my feet. I forced out, “I’m fine.”

That world didn’t exist. It couldn’t.

And I didn’t know how to exist in a world without him in it.

A moment later, Rose was there, shoving Ben Andor away from me. “What the hell did you do?!”

He was baffled. “Nothing!”

And the wind did not sing.

7

Days Gone

DAYS GONE FUNERAL Home sat at the perfect junction between Corley and Cobblemire Roads. It sat there so patiently, like an ancient ward on the corner, looming over the rest of the small town of Mairmont, South Carolina, like a benevolent grim reaper. It stood at exactly the right height in exactly the center of the plot of land, and it looked the way it always had: old and stoic and sure.

The funeral home had been a staple in Mairmont for the last century, passed from Day to Day to Day with love and care. Everyone in Mairmont knew the Days. They knew Xavier and Isabella Day, my parents, and knew that they loved their job, and us children—Florence, Carver, and Alice Day—who didn’t love the funeral home as much as our parents, but we loved it enough. We Days dealt in death like accountants dealt in money and lawyers dealt in fees. And because of this, we Days weren’t like the other people of Mairmont. Everyone said that when a Day was born, they were already wearing funeral clothes. We treated death with the kind of celebration most people only ever reserved for life.

No one understood my family. Not really.

Not even me, to be honest.

But when it was time, everyone in Mairmont agreed that they’d rather be buried by a Day than anyone else on earth.

I never thought I would come back to Mairmont. Not like this, with a small carry-on suitcase and a backpack with my laptop and an extra toothbrush in tow. My hometown sat in the liminal space between Greenville and Asheville, so close to the state line you could walk up to the Ridge, spit off it, and hit North Carolina. It was the epitome of nowhere, and I used to love it.

But that was a very, very long time ago.

Somehow, I had managed to snag an Uber who’d drive me from Charlotte to Mairmont, and when the Prius pulled down Main Street, it looked just like it did in my memories. South Carolina was warmer than New York; the Bradford pears that lined the roads already unfurling their green leaves, speckled with white flowers. The sun had set, but it still bled reds and oranges into the horizon like a watercolor painting, and my dad was dead.

It was weird how the thought just appeared like that.

My flight was almost empty, and they gave us pretzels, and my dad was dead.

The Uber driver’s car smelled like lavender incense to cover up the weed, and my dad was dead.

I had already been standing in front of the steps to the Days Gone Funeral Home for ten minutes, watching the figures inside the glowing windows walk in and out of the parlors less and less, because the reading of the will had already started, and Dad was dead.

The funeral home was a renovated Victorian mansion, repainted white every summer so it looked fresh and ghostly for whatever happy haunts decided to arrive. The shingles were a deep obsidian that, when the sun hit the roof just right, sparkled like black sand. The patterns in the foundation’s brickwork were faded reds and oranges, and the wrought iron railings curved sweet deathly designs across the upper windows and dormers. On Valentine’s it was festooned in paper-cutout hearts and pink and red balloons, on the Fourth of July we set off purple fireworks, and at Christmas it was outlined in lights of red and green, like the grumpy old grandfather who didn’t want to admit he was enjoying the holidays but very much was.

It looked just as it had the day I last left for college a decade ago. I still remembered the way Mom kissed my forehead and left a bloodred stain in the shape of her lips, and the way Dad hugged me so tightly, like he didn’t want to say goodbye.

I couldn’t wait for him to hug me again—and then I remembered, like a stone dropping into my stomach—that he wouldn’t. Ever again.

It knocked the breath out of me.

I should’ve come back sooner. I should’ve taken weekend trips like Carver suggested. I should’ve gone fishing with Alice in the summer, I should’ve helped Dad re-stain the front porch, and I should’ve gone with Mom to those ballroom dancing classes.

I should’ve, should’ve, should’ve . . .

But I never did.

The funeral home looked the same as when I last saw it, the stained glass windows and the dormers and the turrets, but there was something inherently wrong as I stood there on the porch, mustering up the courage to step inside.

Dad was gone, and there were crows sitting in the branches of the dead tree beside the house, crowing, prodding me to go inside. I didn’t think much about the crows.

Maybe I should have.

It’s just—the world felt all wrong. Dad should’ve been answering the door. He should’ve been outstretching his arms and bringing me into a rib-crushing hug and telling me what a treat it was to have me back home.

But instead when I rang the doorbell, a large and long gong that reverberated through the house’s old bones, my little sister answered the door. She’d cut her black hair short since the last time I’d seen her, and her gauges were a little larger than last time, though she didn’t have on her dark gothic eyeliner. But that might’ve been because she’d cried it all off.

Which was, like, everyone.

Alice waited in the foyer for me to hang up my coat and made a hurry up motion with her hand. She was dressed in black, from the oversized sweater she pulled over her hands to her black jeans to her black Doc Martens, and for a moment I could trick myself into thinking this was just another day, another family meeting, because Alice always wore black. She had the most Dad in her. Alice wearing black was like a blue sky—it was just right.

I hated the color. For a multitude of reasons. Turns out when you were known for being like that kid in The Sixth Sense, everyone expected you to dress in all black and quote Edgar Allan Poe.

Dad loved Edgar Allan Poe.

Don’t. Don’t think. I took a deep breath, smoothing out the front of my wrinkled light blue blouse, and followed my younger sister toward the largest parlor in the funeral home.

The inside was finished with stately oak floors and dated red floral wallpaper. There was a staircase past the foyer that led to the second—and third—floor of the funeral home, but those parts were reserved mostly for my family. We lived here until I was twelve, as weird as it sounded. The stairs up to the other levels of the house looked tempting in that supernatural-murder sort of way. My bedroom was the second one on the left, the third on the left my brother’s, the two doors on the opposite side my parents’ room, a bathroom with a claw-foot tub, and a small study, and then on the third floor Alice had the loft all to herself. The rooms were all vacant now, filled with decorations and spare furniture, dust-covered and forgotten. I knew every creaky floorboard, every rusted hinge. Electric lamps hung on the walls, giving off a subtle yellow glow. On the first floor—the funeral home part of the house—there were three parlor rooms, the biggest to the left, where I reckoned everyone was waiting for me, and a smaller one to the right, beside the stairs to the second floor, and then one just beyond that. Past the third parlor room was a kitchen with a gas stove and old tiled flooring, and across from the kitchen was the door to the basement. Dad used to joke about having skeletons in our closets because we basically did. The basement was where Dad, undertaker and funeral director, prepared the bodies, and I’d been down there a few times, but not enough to really think much about it. I wasn’t the cadaver type, not like Alice, who always loved to watch Dad work.

I wondered, absently, if Alice was going to prepare Dad, too.

And Dad was dead.

Mrs. Williams, a Black woman with short natural hair, was already reading the will when I came into the parlor and stopped in the doorway, her neon-yellow glasses low on the bridge of her nose. Karen Williams had been Mairmont’s sole lawyer for as long as I could remember. I went to high school with her daughter, who ended up marrying a friend of mine, Seaburn Garrett, the caretaker of Mairmont’s cemetery. Beside Seaburn, sitting in a wingback chair, was Carver and his boyfriend, Nicki. Mom’s parents were in a retirement home in Florida, so I doubted they would be making the trip, and Dad’s parents had passed when I was really little. So this was it.

My family.

My heart floundered. It swelled and deflated and felt strange. And I felt so wrong to be here, gathered in this parlor room that smelled like roses and the softest, barest hint of formaldehyde, without Dad.

Mom looked up from her lap when I came into the parlor, and quickly jumped to her feet. “Darling!” she called, opening her arms, and rushed over to me. She drew me into a hug, so tight it was rib cracking, and I buried my face into her warm orange sweater. She smelled like apples and rose perfume, the smell of my childhood—skinned knees and pancakes in the breakfast nook and Sundays at the library, sitting in the stacks reading romance novels. She hugged me so tightly, it felt like every memory was a bone in my body that she needed to hold on to, to make sure they were still here. Still real.

Seaburn bumped his shoulder against mine and gave me a nod. “Nice to see you home.”

Karen gave me a sad smile and said to us, “It seems like Xavier left some instructions for his funeral.” She took out a list from the manila envelope on her lap, and showed it to us.

Carver gave a groan from his seat in the high-back velvet chair. “Chores?”

Alice massaged the bridge of her nose. “Even from beyond the grave, he’s making us work for free.”

A murmur of confusion crossed the room.

A thousand? Why would—oh. Wildflowers, like the ones he picked every Saturday for Mom. I glanced over at her, and she hid a smile as she looked down into her lap. Alice and Carver were blanching at the request—they hadn’t realized its significance.

Why a thousand, though, I didn’t know.

Seaburn murmured to his wife, “Isn’t he dead . . . ?”

Dad would’ve tsked at that and said, “Only mostly dead,” in that cryptic way of his. Because music was a heartbeat, too, in its own way, and death wasn’t a send-off without some good tunes.

I was beginning to get the worst sort of feeling.

I remembered Dad once saying, “When I go out, there’ll be streamers and balloons, buttercup. There won’t be any tears.”

My throat tightened. I curled my hands into fists.

Karen put the receipt back, and kept reading, “Four. I want a murder of twelve to fly during the ceremony.”

They hated me.

Karen went on. “Five, my final request. Buttercup”—I felt my heart skip at my nickname, and even though Karen was reading, I could hear Dad in the words, the soft love there, the lopsided grin—“I have left a letter to be read aloud at the funeral. Not a moment before—”

The doorbell rang.

Seaburn asked the group, “We’re not expecting anyone else, are we?”

I checked my watch. It was 9:00 P.M. A little late for visitors.

Mom said, “Florence, you’re closest.”

A letter? What kind of letter did Dad want me to read for his funeral? I didn’t like the sound of that. For all I knew, it could’ve been mortifying stories from my childhood he’d been keeping as blackmail—like the time I got a marble stuck up my nostril and then shoved a marble in the other one because I was afraid my nose wouldn’t look even. Or the time Carver was playing in a coffin and it closed on him. Or the time Alice thought she was a witch and gathered all the stray cats in the neighborhood as her familiars and they ate the neighbor’s canary. He was that kind of person. And he definitely was the kind of person to include a PowerPoint presentation in the letter, too.

And that just made me miss him more. He couldn’t be gone, could he? He—he could still be here. As a ghost. Lingering. He had unfinished business, didn’t he? He hadn’t said goodbye. He couldn’t be gone. I hadn’t talked with him enough, laughed with him enough, soaked in the stories he had and the cryptic wisdom he espoused and—and—

When I opened the door, I didn’t see anyone at first. Just the porch and the moths that fluttered around the porch lights, and the rocky cobblestones that led to the sidewalk, and the soft streetlights and the wind that rushed through the oak trees.

Then a crow cawed in the oak tree out front, and my eyes focused, and barely—barely—I began to make out an outline. Of a shadow. A body—

A man.

A ghost.

My heart leapt into my throat—Dad?

No—it wasn’t. The man was . . . too tall, too broad. Slowly, like adjusting the focus on a pair of binoculars, the shape took form, until I could see most of him, and my eyes traveled up to the face of the towering stranger, framed by dark hair and a chiseled jaw. It only took a moment to recognize who he was—

Well, who he had once been.

I paused. “Benji . . . Andor?”

And he was most definitely dead.

8

Death of a Bachelor

BEN’S GAZE FELL on mine as soon as I said his name. His eyes were dark and wide and—confused. The slightest crease between his eyebrows deepened as he recognized me. “M-Miss Day?”

I slammed the door closed.

Oh, no. Oh no, no, no.

This wasn’t happening. I didn’t see anything. It was a trick of the light. It was my overworked brain. It was—

No one was there.

Not your dad, and not the crazy-hot editor who was most certainly not dead.

I opened the door again.

And there Benji Andor stood as he had before.

Ghosts didn’t look like they did in the movies—at least from my experience. They weren’t mangled, flesh rotting off their bones. They weren’t pale as if some unfortunate actor had a bad run-in with baby powder, and they didn’t glow like Casper. They shimmered, actually, when they moved. Just enough to make them look a little wrong. Sometimes they looked as solid as anyone living, but other times they were faded and flickering—like a lightbulb on its last wire.

Benji Andor looked like that, standing on the welcome mat to the Days Gone Funeral Home. He looked like how his memories remembered him, the night in Colloquialism, his dark hair neatly gelled back, his suit jacket fitted to his shoulders, his black slacks pressed. His tie was a little askew, though, just enough to make me want to straighten it. My gaze lingered on his lips. I remembered them, the way they tasted.

But now he was—this man was—

The spring wind that rattled through the dead oak tree didn’t mess up his hair, and the light from our foyer didn’t sit right on his face, and his shadow was gone. He shimmered, slightly, like a holograph in glitter. I reached out toward him, slowly, to touch his chest—

And my hand went through him. It was cold. A burst of frost.

He stared down at my hand in his sternum, and I whispered just as he cursed—

9

Dead on Arrival

I blinked, and Benji Andor was gone. I quickly drew my hand back and rubbed at my fingers. They tingled from where I’d touched—and gone through—him. He wasn’t really here. He wasn’t really dead.

I was losing my goddamn mind.

I shook my head, crossing my arms over my chest to warm my cold hand. “No one—I’m fine. It was, um—someone ding-dong ditched.”

She squeezed my shoulder.

He wasn’t.

But if my mother was good at anything, it was seeing right through my lies. “You saw one, didn’t you? A ghost.”

But how much had stayed the same?

I couldn’t tell her that, at the airport, I had debated on whether or not to turn around and go back to my apartment. Skip the funeral. Burrow myself in a murder podcast. Try to forget that Dad was dead. That he was never coming back. That I would never get to, not ever, not while he was alive, tell him about my career, and my ghostwriting, and share with him all of the starred reviews and—

Stop. Stop thinking.

He blinked. As if he wasn’t sure whether I was lying or telling a particularly bad joke, but then I smiled and he barked a laugh. “Ha! If it was Dad, I hope you thoroughly chewed him out.”

My brother was a lot of things—a smartass, a computer tech guru, and a gullible mess. He was like the glue that kept the Day siblings together. I couldn’t remember the last time Alice talked to me of her own volition.

I stared at my brother in surprise. “That’s . . .”

Maybe Carver’s ploy could give me enough time. Not much—but enough. The ghost I saw at the door—it wasn’t a ghost. It was a hallucination. Benji Andor couldn’t be dead. I’d kissed him last night! And he looked healthy, and he wasn’t that old, and as far as I could tell, it would take a lot to murder someone akin to a tree trunk.

He was fine.

It was a trick of my brain—the imaginary ghost of my new editor whom I’d accidentally made out with in a back alley in Brooklyn coming to haunt me because I was already stressed out and chugging along on three hours of sleep and four cups of airplane coffee.

That was all.

Nicki looked up from the will, and handed it to Seaburn. “Well, we’ve sort of got a problem.”

Alice sighed, massaging the bridge of her nose. “Dad didn’t give anyone instructions on any of this,” she said in her deadpan voice. “He just—I guess—thought we could read his freaking mind.”

Dad’s script was long and loopy, and all I wanted to do was move my fingers across the words, memorizing the way he dotted his Is and crossed his Ts. It was written on the yellowed cardstock that I’d gotten him a few years ago for Christmas.

Carver snapped his fingers. “He always picked them out on the old walking trail.”

The Ridge. I didn’t want to think about the Ridge.

Mom joked, “Perhaps we could use the crows he always fed in the evenings. They’re never very far.”

After everyone had left, Carver, Alice (steadfastly ignoring me), and I went around the house and turned off the lights in every room. It was second nature to us at this point, even if I hadn’t been around for ten years. Carver took the back rooms, I took the left, Alice took the right. We checked the windows to make sure they were closed; we locked the doors.

I would be lying if I said I wasn’t looking for Dad as I did.

Though I was about as subtle as an elephant, apparently.

I closed the door to the second parlor room behind me, and my cheeks burned with embarrassment. I was glad that most of the lights were off, so hopefully she couldn’t see them. “I wasn’t looking.”

She pursed her lips and looked away. “Well, I don’t think he’s here.”

My brother gave me a sidelong look, and put his hands in his pockets.

For old times’ sake, I checked the dead bolt again. Locked. Probably Alice’s doing.

I hadn’t been down into the prep room in ages. I hated the smell of it—a mix of disinfectant and formaldehyde, and a distinct undercurrent of something you weren’t really born recognizing. It was a smell you found in the hospital, too, and extended care homes.

There’s a certain smell to death.

You didn’t really recognize it at first, but the longer you existed in those spaces, the more acquainted with it you became. I didn’t realize death had a smell until we moved out of this house. I always thought it was what the world smelled like—a little sad and bitter and heavy. On spring mornings, Dad would open up all of the windows, and turn up the radio, blasting Bruce Springsteen, and try to breathe life into the house again, wake up the old wooden floors and the creaky attic beams.

It was about that time again, when the mornings were crisp but the sun was already warming up the buds on the trees. The air in the house felt heavy with incense and disinfectant and that sad, soft smell of death, waiting to be let out into the wind.

My hand closed tightly around the handle to the basement. Maybe Dad was down there, sitting on one of the cold steel tables, smoking a cigar and wondering when one of his kids would realize he’d been playing us the whole time. He’d laugh and say, “I couldn’t die, buttercup, until I’m good and ready.”

But he was dead, and he wasn’t ready.

And his ghost was not here.

I let go of the handle. I’d come back later when it was light out. When I was in a steadier state of mind.

He kissed me on the temple and said, “It’s good to see you home.”

As we left the funeral home, Mom locked up behind us. We meandered down the stone pathway to the sidewalk. The crows were gone from the oak tree. Had I actually seen them? Or were they just a part of my messed-up head, like my editor?

Mom said as she caught up to me, wrapping her arm around my shoulder, “Oh, it’ll be so nice to have you home! Right, Alice?”

I gave a start. “She’s home, too?”

My sister said pointedly, “Some of us fail quieter.”

Mairmont wasn’t terribly busy in the evenings. Most of the restaurants down Main Street closed up around eight, and the ones that stayed open were packed with sports fans watching a late-night basketball game or families gone for a late-night ice cream run. Nicki and Carver had bought a house together just on the other side of the town square, on a cute road with rainbow-colored houses and white mailboxes, and in five years I could see them fostering a few kids and introducing some pandemonium to their quiet little street.

Honestly, I couldn’t wait for it.

When they had disappeared down the sidewalk, Mom pulled Alice and me close to her, a daughter on each arm, and led us home. The walk was quiet, the night air chilly but not cold like it would’ve been in New York. The flowering Bradford pears did stink, though. A lot. In that unpleasant way teen boys’ bedrooms did. But the trees did look beautiful with their small white buds glowing in the streetlights that lined Main Street. The soft golden glow reflected off the windows, and the wind was quiet, and the sky was wide.

My parents moved into the unassuming two-story house around the corner from the funeral home when I was twelve. Neither Carver nor Alice really remembered ever living in the funeral home—they didn’t remember that the third stair creaked, or that at night when the wind rattled the old rafters they moaned, or that sometimes you could hear footsteps in the attic. (Though, later, I managed to get rid of them.) I was the only child who remembered living—truly living—in the funeral home. Dad chasing me across the hardwood floors, and Mom humming as she restored the stained glass window above the door. Alice wandering around the front yard in her underwear, a funeral bouquet fixed onto her head like a flower crown. Carver drawing great stick figure epics on the parlor walls, improving the fifty-year-old wallpaper filled with flowers and orchids. Me, with my bedroom door locked, whispering to the ghosts who came to find me.

Alice and Carver didn’t remember why we moved, but it was because of me. Because one night, when I had been pulled out of bed by a mischievous young spirit, I had found myself wandering toward the basement.

He had smiled at me. “Absolutely—I wanna see. I have to see,” he said as he led me down into the mortuary. I had gone down there a few times with Dad, but never alone. It was where the dead were stored in narrow freezer boxes until their funeral came. I didn’t know the facts yet. I just knew Dad prepared them for the rest of their journey—like Charon over the river Styx.

There were only two guests in the mortuary that night—Dad called them “guests.” They were bodies. Obviously. I had guessed the right freezer box on the first try, and pulled the drawer out. On the narrow table lay a boy who looked a lot like the one who stood beside me. Young—twelve, maybe. Dad had already fixed him up, painted his blue lips tan, and covered the bruises on his neck.

He took a large breath (or as much as a large breath looked), and then he nodded—just once. “Thanks—thank you.”

And like the dozens of ghosts before him, the sparkling bits that made him began to break away like dandelion tufts, and dispersed into the room—and he moved on. A firework there, then gone. And I was left alone in the frigid mortuary.

I climbed the steps to the door again, but it had locked itself when it closed the first time—I had forgotten to unlock it. I pushed on it—once, twice.

Banged on it—called for help.

Nothing worked.

Dad found me the next morning. Apparently, they had looked everywhere once they realized I was missing, until they finally came down into the mortuary and found me curled up on the steel table in the middle of the room, a blanket over me, asleep.

Mom and Dad decided that maybe—just maybe—raising a family in a funeral home might not be as eclectic and wholesome as they were expecting.

Luckily, there was an old two-story house down the street, built in 1941, so it gave Mom things to renovate and fix around the house as we grew up. That was her college major—architectural renovations. She was really good at it, too. I used to wonder if she ever regretted marrying Dad, and moving to a small nowhere town with nowhere people, but she never gave the slightest hint she did. She took unloved things, like the stained glass window above the door in the funeral home, and the stone and brass fireplace in the new house, and turned them into wonders.

The new house was less showy than the funeral home. It sat on a side road off Main Street, beside the Gulliver family and the Mansons, built with old crumbling bricks as red as clay, and pristine white shutters. But at night, when Carver and Alice’s respective room lights were on, the house looked like it had eyes and a grinning red mouth for a door.

The house was exactly as I remembered it as we came up the cobblestone pathway. Bare threads of ivy clung to the brick walls, and a lone spider hung from the sconce beside the door. Alice’s red convertible was in the driveway, though it looked a lot worse for wear these days, beside Mom’s unassuming SUV. Dad had a motorcycle, though I didn’t see it in the driveway. I wondered where it was.

The house was warm and it smelled like it always had—of pinewood and fresh linens. The walls were a bright gray, and the furniture was hand-me-down and restored, worn and loved. A staircase off the main hallway led up to most of the bedrooms, while the master was on the first floor, across from the living room. There were photos of all of us on the stairway wall—from elementary school through college graduation, smiling moments frozen in time. Years where we went through bad hair, and blue hair, and braces, and acne.

I looked at one of the earliest photos of us—so early, Alice was an infant. It had been taken outside of the funeral home, Mom in a sleek red dress and Dad in a terrible tweed suit, Carver in one to match. I had pitched a fit that day because I wanted to wear my rainbow unicorn house shoes instead of the white dress shoes that hurt my feet, and I’d won. There I was in a fluffy red dress and . . . unicorn slippers.

On the hallway table there were a few framed newspaper clippings. Dad getting the keys to the town. Mom being presented with a local restoration award. Carver winning a robotics competition. And—

LOCAL GIRL SOLVES MURDER WITH GHOSTS

Along with a photo of thirteen-year-old me smiling for the papers.

It made me sick to my stomach.

I jumped at her voice, and spun to her. She rattled the ice in the glass, waiting for me to take it. Suddenly, I was very much not in the mood. “I—I think I’m going to go to the bed-and-breakfast.”

Mom poked her head out of the kitchen. “What? But it’s so late . . .”

Mom gave her a surprised look. “There is?”

Alice shrugged. “Was gonna let her figure it out herself.”

I just couldn’t stay here. In this house. After the episode at the funeral home, I didn’t want to test being home. Mom already had enough to worry about with the funeral. I didn’t want her to have to worry about me, too.

Mom relented without persisting. She was good at that—at seeing when people were shutting down, and letting them. “Of course, darling. See you in the morning.”

I smiled a small thank-you, trying not to meet Alice’s hard gaze, and wheeled my suitcase down the cobblestone steps again, back toward Main Street. Mairmont was quiet at night, but walking the sidewalk alone, while all the storefronts were closed, reminded me how out of place I felt here in the town that never really accepted me. In New York, I could walk down any street and find another creature of the night walking, too. But here, everyone had their cozy houses and their cozy families, all sequestered for the night, and I was alone.

I told myself I didn’t mind it.

I packed my bags and left the day after high school graduation. I never visited. I never looked back. Not when Carver proposed the idea of TP’ing my bully’s yard for my birthday a few years ago, not when my parents had their thirty-year anniversary.

Not when Alice begged me to come home.

We had been best friends once, but that was a lifetime ago. I didn’t regret leaving—I couldn’t regret leaving. It was for my own sanity. But looking back on it, I could’ve handled it a little better. That I did regret. I could’ve not shut Alice out of my life. I could’ve visited once in a blue moon. I could’ve . . .

Would’ve, should’ve, could’ve.

Hindsight was such a bitch. Because everything I ran from had caught up with me. Even the crows that now sat on the roof of the bed-and-breakfast, looking down at me with their beady black eyes.

I tightened my grip on my suitcase. They were just birds. They didn’t mean anything. And even if they did, I had nowhere else to go.

10

Dead and Breakfast

THE MAIRMONT BED-AND-BREAKFAST was a small B and B on the corner of Main and Walnut. It was tucked into a garden that was green even in winter, its blue vinyl siding barely visible beneath all of the ivies that grew on it. I pushed open the wrought iron gate and made my way up the stone pathway to the front door. A soft golden light spilled in through the front windows, which meant Dana was still minding the desk. They were the night kind of person that sat up reading Stephen King and obscure nonfiction on Queen Victoria or Lord Byron’s lovers. They were sitting on a stool behind a heavy wooden desk when I finally elbowed the screen door open and wiggled my suitcase inside. They looked up, large round glasses perched on the bridge of their nose, secured with a golden chain that draped down on either side of their pale, long face. Dana had short curly brown hair and a wide smile with a gap between their two front teeth, and when they saw me, their smile widened even more.

They winced. “Right, oh shit. I’m sorry. I knew that. Sorry. It’s just—surprising. To see you.”

I fixed on a smile. “Well, I’m here.”

If I make it that long, I thought as I took out the last credit card I owned and painfully handed it to them. I’d just climbed out of my credit card debt too, but I couldn’t stay at home. Not right now. Not when Dad wasn’t . . .

I just couldn’t.

Dana checked me in, asking whether I’d want one bed or two—one, preferably on the second floor of the three in this house, and not beside the stairs if they could help it. “And the least spooky one,” I added, sort of joking.

Sort of not.

They laughed. “Don’t want to solve any more murders?”

I looked at the key, and the key chain that hung from it—a wooden violet. “Let me guess, there’s purple in the room?”

They wiggled their ring finger. It was a black band made out of meteorite. Of course they’d be cool like that. “Alas, off the market.”

They smiled. “Thanks! If you need anything, we’re the two you talk to.”

Dana gave a sad smile. “Oh, she passed a few years ago. Gave the whole damn inn to me.”

The room was dark, with only the golden glow from the streetlight on the sidewalk shining in through the window. There was no movement. No ghostly apparitions.

Coast was clear.

I flicked on the light beside the door and rolled my suitcase inside. The room was bigger than the one I paid for with blood and tears every month in Hoboken, New Jersey. There was a full bed big enough to fit me and all my baggage, a dresser, a floor-length mirror, and even a closet. There was a coffeepot on top of the dresser, and a boutique assortment of teas and instant coffees, as well as a flat-screen TV mounted on the wall. The bathroom was beautiful, too, with a claw-foot tub and a large vanity. I was definitely going to take advantage of that. Traveling made me sore, and the stress from today had cramped my neck badly, and my orthopedic pillow was five hundred miles away. Dana was right, though; there wasn’t enough purple in a room they called the Violet Suite.

As I began to unpack my carry-on luggage, putting my underwear in the top drawer and hanging my black funeral dress in the closet, I honestly forgot about the crows on the roof. My hands were busy, and my head was—for the first time all day—mercifully blank.

And then I heard a noise.

I quickly grabbed my razor for defense—what could a razor do?—and rounded the bathroom doorway slowly.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking for a six-foot-three romance editor in oxford leather loafers, argyle socks, a crumpled white shirt, and neatly pressed trousers. But there was no one in my hotel room.

My dad was dead, and I didn’t need ghosts to complicate that. I didn’t need anyone to complicate that. My family was already complicated enough—never mind my history with Mairmont. If I started talking with ghosts again, I was sure to land in the Mairmont gossip circles within the week: “Did you hear, Florence is back and talking to herself again?”

Poor Florence and her imaginary friends.

Florence and her ghosts—

I swallowed the knot in my throat, and without saying another word, I turned off the lights and fell onto my bed and pulled the covers over my head.

All I could think of was how quiet the inn was, and how my thoughts were so loud against it, and how in New York I never had to hear silence. I never had to think about Mairmont, or the people here, or why I left.

For ten years, I hopped from one apartment to the next, chasing after a love story that wasn’t mine, trying to force myself to be the exception instead of the rule, and over and over again all I found was heartbreak and loneliness, and never once did I see a murder of crows in a dead oak tree, or a ghost on my front steps, because I was like everyone else, normal and lost, and my dad was still alive.

And just for a second—one second longer—I wanted to be that Florence, and live in that pocket of time again.

But it was gone, and so was my dad.

11

Past Tense

I SLEPT FOR almost three hours.

Almost.

I knew how ghosts worked. They always popped up in the most unexpected places, and I wasn’t sure when Benji Andor would show up again. If he showed up again. A very small, very unreliable part of me well and truly hoped I’d imagined him. But tell that to my anxiety, which was dead set on not letting me get a full REM cycle of sleep. Every groan and crack of the old house startled me awake, until my phone finally went off at 9:30 A.M.

And I felt like a truck had run me over, backed up, and hit me again.

At least I had packed my heavy-duty concealer—the good stuff. I slathered it under my eyes and hoped I looked at least a little alive as I traipsed down the steps to the foyer, where a larger redheaded man sat on the stool Dana occupied last night. He had on an anime T-shirt and about half a dozen piercings in his face, and it took me a moment to recognize him.

He looked up from his magazine at the sound of his name, and put on a smile. “Flo-town! Dana said you were staying here!” He stood and quickly hurried around the desk to give me a bear hug. Approximately three of my ribs cracked and I died. He set me down with a laugh. “It’s been—how long, ten years?”

He blushed and rubbed the back of his neck. He had on a hat with a pizza design on it, and a loud floral button-down. Miles from the guy I dated in high school—polo shirts and short buzzed hair and a football scholarship to Notre Dame. “Ah, yeah, a lot’s happened.”

He laughed. “That’s good to hear. And how’s your wr—” The old rotary phone at the desk began to ring, and he apologetically excused himself to go take the call. “Mairmont Bed-and-Breakfast, John speaking . . .” Then he put his hand over the receiver and whispered to me, “It’s good to see you, though I’m sorry about your dad. He was a real good guy.”

The words hit me like a hurricane, because for a moment I’d forgotten. “Thank you,” I forced out, fixing a smile onto my face.

He went back to the person on the phone, and I left as quickly as I could. I think he shouted after me about breakfast, but I was already late to the Waffle House to meet my family, and no offense to the breakfast at the inn—nothing topped hash browns scattered, smothered, and covered.

The WaHo was at the end of Main Street, near the elementary school and the bookstore, and the parking lot was jammed with travelers stopping through Mairmont on their way through South Carolina to North Carolina and Tennessee. It was close enough to Pigeon Forge to visit Dollywood whenever you wanted or pop over to Asheville to tour the Biltmore. Mairmont was situated just on the outskirts of the Appalachian Mountains, hilly enough to have great walking trails but flat enough for the mountain roads to not kill a Prius. My family sat in the farthest booth at the diner, already eating their cheesy hash browns and sausage-and-egg omelets. I quickly hurried over and slid into the booth beside Mom.

She said, “We already ordered you a waffle and hash browns,” as she slid over a cup of coffee.

I took a long drink. “Mmh, battery acid.”

Alice agreed. “Some things never change.”

Carver gave me a strange look from across the table. “That hungry?”

Mom asked, “So how’s the bed-and-breakfast? I heard it was renovated after Nancy Riviera passed. Is it pretty?”

Alice gave me a pointed look, as if it was my fault.

Alice interrupted, “She turned it into her art room.”

Mom clapped her hands together. “Right! The schedule.”

I blinked. “Come again?”

Alice said, “There’s two funerals we have to get through first. Mr. Edmund McLemore and Jacey Davis.”

Carver shook his head. “I know no one else’ll point this out—but don’t you think it’s a bit insane that we have to do other people’s funerals when Dad’s dead? Can’t they get someone else?”

Alice gave him a tired look. “Who, exactly? There’s not another funeral home in town.”

But Mom was having none of it. She waved her hand dismissively. “They want to be buried by a Day, and it’s an honor and a privilege to do so! I won’t send them somewhere else when we can give them the best ending.”

It was next to impossible to argue with Mom when she had her mind set. Much like Alice, she was immovable. Carver was the sensible one, but he also knew when it was a lost cause. He shook his head and mumbled something under his breath (that sounded suspiciously like “this is why we never went on vacation”), and I was left sopping up the syrup and asking, “Can I do anything to help?”

I frowned down into my waffle. Business as usual, even though one of us was gone, and it was strange in the way that The Twilight Zone was strange. As though, on the plane ride home, I’d fallen into a parallel dimension. Everything was off-kilter enough to be wonky. How everyone’s life was still running, still going, still pushing forward when Dad—

I fisted my hands. “But what about Dad’s funeral arrangements?”

That struck a nerve. “Well, I have time, so I’ll do all of them.”

My younger sister rolled her eyes. “You don’t have to do all of them. I just meant—”

She threw up her hands. “Sure! Whatever! Do it yourself. Florence Day, always being the lone hero!”

No, but I wasn’t the one picking the fights. I began to say as much, when Carver checked his smart watch and said, “Karen’s supposed to come by with Dad’s finances in a few. Want to go ahead and head over there, Mom?”

Yes, but I’d figure it out.

I wanted to ask about the lawyer, and the finances—I hadn’t heard anything about a meeting, but it seemed like my siblings had. Maybe they didn’t want me to be a part of it, or I’d missed the memo, or . . . I didn’t know. A myriad of things.

But whatever—I tried to brush off the feeling that I was missing out on something that I should’ve been a part of as I grabbed the ticket for the bill.

My family scooted out of the booth and started talking about the funeral and how widely to send out the invitations. To the relatives in the Lowcountry, and the poker club, and most of Mairmont (including the mayor, Fetch, a bubbly golden retriever who had won reelection three times).

Mom sighed as she followed Alice and Carver out of the WaHo. “I wonder if it would be frowned upon to dance with his portrait at the wake? You know the picture—him in the dovetail tuxedo? So dashing.”

I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from smiling. I was still angry with Alice—she was hurting, we all were—but I missed them. I missed mornings like this, and bad soggy waffles, and I missed Dad.

I didn’t think missing him would feel so lonely, though.

I leaned on the counter, beside a guy muttering to himself—small towns, they always had at least one weird guy—and handed the cashier a twenty. She smiled and said, “You must be Florence!”

The man beside me went rigid.

Or not really there.

And worse yet, I recognized his dark hair and navy trousers and the articulate way he had rolled up his sleeves tightly to his elbows. He looked like he could’ve been a painting of a forlorn businessman . . .

. . . of the slightly dead variety.

I paled.

The cashier’s smile faltered. “Oh, no. I’m so sorry to hear about your father—”

Suddenly, the jukebox gave a loud screech, and the lights flickered with a start. It picked a random album and inserted it into the player. The neon lit up, and a song crackled from the forty-year-old speakers.

I winced. And whispered, “Stop it.”

His wide eyes darted to the jukebox, then back to me. “I—that’s not me.”

The piano beat. The tambourine. And suddenly I’m back in the red parlor after a wake, dancing on Dad’s feet as he sings “buttercup, don’t break my heart” in an awful key, golden afternoon light streaming through the window. It fills me with bitterness, because it’s gone. The moment’s gone—all those moments are gone.

My throat constricts.

I trained my eyes at the sidewalk in front of me. “This isn’t happening.”

Don’t look at him. Don’t look at him.

An older gentleman walking his dog decided to cross to the other side of the street, and I didn’t know if it was because of me or because the dog had to take a poo in an azalea bush on the other side, but it didn’t stop me from guessing. I fished my phone out of my pocket and mimed answering a call.

In two steps, he had caught back up with me. “Please don’t ignore me—everyone is. Everyone. I sat in that diner for—for hours—trying to get someone to see me. No one could! No one! What’s happening to me? Last I remembered I was at your front door, and then I was in the diner and—things don’t make sense—and you’re not listening—”

His shoulders slumped. “So it’s true . . . no one can see me. Except you? But—why?” About fifty emotions crossed his face, from disbelief to confusion, before he finally settled on accusatory. “What makes you special?”

I winced. Even though I was walking at a pretty fast pace, he was keeping up on his long legs without even breaking a sweat. There was no way I’d outpace him. Sometimes, I hated being short.

Often, actually.

On top of my father’s funeral, Benji Andor’s ghost was something I didn’t need.

But . . . I couldn’t ignore him, either.

Especially hearing his voice crack like that, begging for me to see him because—

My dad would tell me to help him. My dad would say it was our job, our duty, our responsibility. A responsibility I hadn’t risen to in about ten years. Not since I left Mairmont. And of course I felt like I had to now, because if Dad was here, he would have.

I stopped at the street corner, and decided, well, to make my dear dead dad proud, and spun on my heels to face Benji. He came to an abrupt stop a few inches away, and I realized just how silly I probably looked to him from his angle. I didn’t care. “You’re a ghost,” I started. “A spirit. Working through a post-living experience.”

His voice wound tight again, like Alice’s used to when she began to have a panic attack. I’d never encountered a ghost this adamant about being alive before. When I was a child, every ghost that came looking for me knew they were dead. It wasn’t a hard leap to make, but Benji Andor seemed to be the kind of straitlaced guy who dealt in facts and figures instead of midnight ghost stories and myths.

And I couldn’t believe I was doing this.

I punched my fist straight through his chest.

I removed my fist. Touching a ghost tingled for me, too. It felt cold, and a bit crackly—like my fingers had fallen asleep. “Not even inside? Not even a little?”

He ignored my very funny joke. “I can’t be dead because I don’t remember dying, thank you very much. And ghosts don’t exist. It’s scientifically proven.”

We came to the roundabout in the middle of town. There was a green park in the middle with a white gazebo, and a man who looked like my old orchestra teacher on the steps practicing a rousing rendition of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” on his cello. He was really tearing up the strings.

What a question.

One that Lee Marlow never asked as I told him all of my ghost stories. He simply suspended his disbelief as I weaved my memories into his fiction. Did he ever find a reason for why I could see ghosts? Did his editor ask how? Did Lee finally have to make something by himself?

I didn’t know—and I didn’t want to know.

But leave it to an editor to ask the questions that burn into plot holes.

He held up his hand to stop me, his other massaging the bridge of his nose. “Okay, okay, I get it. I just . . . I want to know why. And why you.”

I opened the wrought iron gate to the inn—and froze. “Wait . . .” I turned back to him. “You knew?”

I blinked. “Oh. Well then.”

I whirled around and marched up the front walk to the veranda. “No, no, I definitely get what you meant. Me, the failure that I am.”

I wanted to believe him. Wished I could. But I knew myself better than someone who had talked with me for thirty minutes and kissed me behind a hipster bar, and I knew exactly what I was—who I was.

A coward who ran away from the only home she ever knew. A gullible idiot who fell for guys who promised her the world. And a failure who couldn’t finish the one thing she was good at.

Suddenly, a strange look crossed his face. Confusion. Then curiosity. He cocked his head. “Do you hear th—?”

The next second he was gone, and I was left standing on the veranda alone.

12

Emotional Support

THE PHONE RANG four and a half times before Rose picked up.

I checked my watch. “What’re you still doing at the office? Isn’t this your lunch?”

Rose gave a hard sigh. “Yeah, I know, but you’re the big sister, right? You’ve always been really good at pushing through whatever feelings you have and getting things done. I mean, remember when that guy—Quinn—stood you up on a date and you had to finish edits for Midnight Matinee in like twelve hours?”

On a long laundry list of guys that I fell for that sucked.

At the mention of help, I bristled. “Who said help? I don’t need help. And anyway, what are you doing in the offices on a Saturday?” I wanted to change the subject, to get away from the things that I might’ve once been good at but wasn’t anymore. Which, as it turned out, happened to be everything. “And are you—are you in a stall?”

I rolled over on the bed, and the springs creaked. I stared up at the speckled ceiling. “You . . . got a promotion?”

Ben.

I bolted up in bed. “He did?”

I was still way back on Ben Andor getting hit by a car. Blood everywhere. For some reason, that one scene from Meet Joe Black played in my head, over and over again, but instead of Brad Pitt, it was Benji Andor in a dark blue suit and striped tie being flung across the road again and again and again—like a football game’s fourth-quarter touchdown instant replay.

So he really was dead. I mean—of course he was. But it also meant I wasn’t going crazy. That he was actually here, haunting me. He hadn’t showed up until last night. And that meant he was sticking around because his unfinished business had something to do with me.

There was a voice on the other side, and then the clip of heels out of the bathroom.

Rose picked up the phone a moment later with a morose tone. “The boss just came to check on me. I gotta go—but if you need me, let me know, okay? I’ll catch the next flight down and be there with you.”

That sounded so tempting, but plane tickets were expensive, and she was needed at her job. I’d be fine. I always was. “Nah, but thank you, though.”

I waited for her to hang up, and flopped back down on the squeaky bed. Having some help would be nice, but I didn’t need it. Xavier Day was my father. His funeral was my responsibility. So instead I pulled up Google on my phone and punched in where to find the nearest flower shop. I could do things on my own—I didn’t need to bother anyone else. Alice was up to her gills in funeral preparations and Carver had his own job and Mom—Mom couldn’t do everything.

I wasn’t sure if my siblings could see it, but she was barely holding herself together.

No, this was my job. I was the eldest. I could do this. Alone.

I had for this long, anyway.

13

Ghoul Intentions

THE CROWS WERE on the roof when I left the bed-and-breakfast that afternoon, and that meant Ben was lurking around somewhere. Though at the moment, either he didn’t want to be perceived, or he was hiding in a bush somewhere crying. I would be, if I found out I was dead and the only person who could see me was a failure of a ghostwriter who gave him a plant instead of, you know, the manuscript that was due.

I should tell him what Rose told me—about his accident. He had disappeared so suddenly this morning, I didn’t get the chance to ask if he remembered how he died or not. Though, the fact that he thought he was still alive, somehow, definitely tilted that answer toward not.

Google Maps on my phone said that the Main Street Flower Emporium was still open after all these years, so I left for the center of town. My senior year prom date bought a corsage from them that ended up being haunted.

I didn’t want to think about how that happened.

Just like I didn’t want to think about the deep, twisting vein of sadness in my stomach, and how as time passed in Mairmont and Dad wasn’t here, it kept growing. Would it go away someday? Would the dagger in my side slowly shrink to a paper cut? Would the grief ever disappear, or was it stagnant? Would it always be there, just under the surface, lurking in the way only grief could?

I’d always written how grief was hollow. How it was a vast cavern of nothing.

But I was wrong.

Grief was the exact opposite. It was full and heavy and drowning because it wasn’t the absence of everything you lost—it was the culmination of it all, your love, your happiness, your bittersweets, wound tight like a knotted ball of yarn.

The bell above the door chimed as I came into the flower shop. It smelled like roses and lilies and my grandmother’s potpourri that she always kept in the bathroom. There was an older gentleman behind the counter, fixing up a flower arrangement. An old-timey radio played Elvis in the background.

He looked at me over his thick glasses, and his eyebrows jerked up. “Miss Florence Day! If it isn’t you, I swear.”

I fixed a smile over my mouth. “It’s me. How are you?”

I blanched. That was more than my part of the apartment rent for the month, and I most certainly didn’t have that kind of money. “Well—um. That’s good to know, I guess.”

Mr. Taylor barked a laugh. “Course he did! Mind if I ask what else you need doing?”

So I told him—the flowers, and the murder of crows, and the party decorations, and Elvis—

My heart jumped into my throat. “He ordered flowers?”

So, not wildflowers. Of course Dad wouldn’t make it that easy. But Foxglove Lane . . . I knew where it was. But why would he send flowers there? I didn’t know why I said what I did next. Maybe it was to glimpse into the everyday life I’d missed. Maybe it was to walk, for a moment more, in Dad’s shoes. I said, “I’ll deliver the flowers.”

It really wasn’t that big a deal, and I really didn’t have anything else to do today. I didn’t want to go to Bar None, because it was Saturday in the late afternoon, and I was sure it was already getting a bit crowded. And while I loved Mairmont, I didn’t want to see many of the people in there. I didn’t know who from my graduating class left the town or stayed—and most of them, unlike Dana and John, hadn’t been very nice.

I’d been lucky to have not run into them thus far, but considering that I’d only been here about twenty-four hours . . . I knew my luck was shit, and it’d run out sooner rather than later.

As I left the florist, I tried to ignore my untimely shadow, and Ben was really hard to ignore. Especially because he was pretending to not follow me, and that just made it creepier.

He winced and turned back to face me. “Sorry. I was . . . I just saw you and I . . .”

He wilted. “I have no excuse.”

There was nowhere else. It was me and then . . . whatever came after. If anything came after. My family was the spiritual but not religious sort. We all had our different ideas of what happened—whether we returned to the world, or became part of the wind, or just . . . if we just stopped.

And anyway, whatever I could’ve said wouldn’t have helped him.

He was, on all accounts, dead. Rose had verified it. And at least I knew I wasn’t going crazy—he really was here. For the moment, however long it took.

And I was his last stop.

I hugged the arrangement tighter. “Well, you can come with me,” I offered.

My frown deepened as I thought, prompting Ben to propose, “We’ll see when we get there, I suppose.”

Foxglove Lane was one of those quiet streets adjacent to the main drag where you could just see yourself buying a house behind a white picket fence and growing old in it. The houses were all different colors of Charleston-type designs, with porches that faced the west and narrow builds. When I was eight or nine, I went to a birthday party for someone who lived on Foxglove Lane. Adair Bowman, maybe? It was a slumber party and they broke out the Ouija board and I sat back and had absolutely nothing to do with it.

One, because Ouija boards were mass-market trash made by a toy company to sell the occult to the middle class.

Two, because even though Ouija boards were mass-market trash made by a toy company to sell the occult to the middle class, I still refused to poke the bear.

Adair called me a scaredy-cat. I definitely was. But I also slept perfectly well that night while the rest of the kids had nightmares about old General Bartholomew from the cemetery coming to haunt their dreams.

The house in question was halfway down the lane, far past Adair’s old family home—though I think they moved the year after I’d solved the infamous murder. It was smaller than the others, but very well loved. The front lawn was quaint, with trimmed azaleas around the house and a colorful flower bed, newly planted for spring.

I climbed the brick steps to the front door and rang the doorbell.

It took a moment, but an old lady finally answered. She was hunched over, wrapped in a fluffy pink housecoat and darned slippers, and had the most beautiful wide brown eyes. “Oh,” she said, opening the glass door. “Hello.”

I offered up the daylilies. “These are for you.”

Her eyes lit up at the arrangement, and she took it gently with gnarled and bruised hands. There was dirt under her long fingernails. She gardened. Alone?

There was a shimmer in the hall behind her, an older man in an orange sweater and brown trousers, the hair that was left on the sides of his head combed back. He mouthed, “Thank you,” his eyes glistening with tears.

Oh. I understood now.

Mrs. Elizabeth smelled one of the lilies and smiled. “Charlie always gave me lilies on our anniversary. I think that’s today? Oh, my. Time’s always a bit wonky when you get older,” she added with a laugh. “Thank you, dear. You know, I get these every year but I still don’t know who from!”

Sometimes, a spirit’s final business wasn’t talking to someone, or exposing their murderer, or seeing their own dead body—sometimes it was simply a waiting game.

Ben was playing a different sort of waiting game on the sidewalk. He looked paler than he had a few minutes before. “That man—he looked like I do. Shimmery and . . .” With a hard inhale, he sank into a crouch, his hands on the back of his neck. “I really am dead, aren’t I?”

I finished my bite of cookie, and sank down next to him. “Do you really not remember how you died?”

He shook his head. “No. I mean—I—I remember leaving work, and then . . .” He inhaled sharply. Halted. Clenched his jaw. “It was . . . just outside of the building, wasn’t it? My accident?”

Silently, I nodded, but I wasn’t sure he saw me. If he saw anything, really. His eyes had this distant look to them, a thousand-mile stare to a place and time he’d never be again.

He bent his head, as if he could hide the fact that he was crying, but his too-big shoulders shaking gave him away. I wanted to reach out for his shoulder, to comfort him in one of those there, there pats, but I couldn’t even touch him. I wasn’t good at other people’s emotions because I didn’t know how to help, usually. When someone was in pain, I wanted to fix it. And I couldn’t.

Which made me frustrated.

And when I was frustrated, I cried. If I was not already mortified enough. This had to stop—now. I tried the only way I knew how. “A-At least you’re still kinda hot,” I sobbed.

He jerked his attention to me. His eyes were red rimmed. “W-What?”

The tears just kept coming. I pushed them away as quickly as I could. “D-Drop-dead g-gorgeous, really.”

But he did—and he laughed. It was soft, and weak, more of a pah than a laugh, but it was there. He rubbed his palms over his eyes. “You’re the weirdest woman I’ve ever met.”

He pursed his lips together, and then said, surprising me, “I’m afraid you’re gravely mistaken.”

I barked a laugh, a real laugh that I didn’t know I had in me anymore, and it surprised me. It surprised him, too, because he looked away to hide a smile, rubbing the tears out of the corners of his eyes. While the mission wasn’t accomplished, I think I did get him to feel a little better, and at least he wasn’t crying, and that meant I wasn’t crying, either.

I said, shaking my head, “That was a terrible pun.”

I couldn’t touch him—this wasn’t my first ghost, and probably wasn’t my last—but it was instinct. To comfort him. Even though I wanted someone to comfort me, too. I just wanted someone to stop me, and sit me down, and tell me that things would hurt for a while, but they wouldn’t hurt forever.

I wanted to tell him that this wasn’t forever.

My fingers slipped through his shoulder, numb and cold—

And then he was gone.

Again.

14

Moonwalks

FINDING A THOUSAND wildflowers would be the death of me.

I didn’t want to take Mr. Taylor up on his offer because I didn’t want anyone to go out of their way for me. If I was going to do something, I didn’t want to inconvenience anyone else. It might’ve been because I was stubborn, or because I just didn’t like help, but I resolved to do all these things on Dad’s list alone. So, I called a florist within twenty-five miles from me and asked about the price and delivery fees of a thousand fucking wildflowers. Turns out, they cost more than my first apartment in Brooklyn, and that was the place that I shared with a cockroach big enough to contend with Godzilla.

After Ben disappeared, I went back to the inn, where I returned to my search for a thousand wildflowers. I had moved from my room to the tiny bar downstairs that didn’t have a bartender, but a bell I could ring to summon Dana and ask them for another rum and Coke. Which I did. Often. I had my laptop with me, opened to Yelp and Google Maps and twenty other tabs that I’d rather not mention.

Could I pick the flowers in the wild? Where even was a wildflower field? Maybe the Ridge? But it was April. And there had already been more than one cold snap. They’d be dead and crispy by the time I found them. And it was the Ridge.

I didn’t want to go there. Not ever.

Dana poked their head through the doorway behind the bar that led to the check-in counter. “Everything okay in here?”

I turned around on my stool.

And there sitting so perfectly behind me was a golden retriever named Fetch. A little grayer than I remembered around his snout, he was still just as fetching as he had been the day I met him, before I left for college.

That was ten years ago—holy shit, I suddenly felt old.

I glanced up.

Seaburn, his owner, stood with his hands in his pockets. “Thought we’d find you here.”

I looked up as the mayor tried to go to second base with his tongue. “Mom sent you?”

In fact, she seemed a little bit angry. “It’s not like I can’t run my own business!” she cried. “I’ll be fine! I’ve been doing this for thirty years!”

It was all I could do to leave with my head intact.

Seaburn sat down on the stool next to me. “Your mom does things in her own way, on her own time. We should leave her to it.”

That didn’t mean I wasn’t worried. And focusing on my mother felt a lot more constructive than focusing on my own sadness. Hers I felt like I could at least try to fix. Mine? It was a hole in my chest filled with all of the things that made my grief so heavy, it was hard to breathe sometimes.

I gave the mayor one last good scrub behind his ears before I resumed my seat and took another long gulp of my rum and Coke.

Seaburn and I had graduated within a few years of each other. He was a junior when I started at Mairmont High. His family owned and maintained St. John’s of Mairmont Cemetery on the other side of town, so it felt only natural that, when Dad needed someone to help manage the funeral business, he asked Seaburn if he wanted to work together. For the last seven years or so, Dad and Seaburn had managed the funerals and the gravesite services for the majority of the town. And apparently Dad had started to train Alice in the same thing.

Seaburn asked Dana for a beer, and asked me, “Still writing?”

He barked a laugh. “Good! I liked your first book—Ardently Yours. So funny. Loved the romance bits, too.”

I groaned into my hands, mortified.

That was flattering, especially from Seaburn, who read so much and so widely my reading habits probably paled in comparison. “A romance leaves you happy—or at least content—at the end. Or it’s supposed to. I think.”

Because I didn’t know anymore.

I rubbed my thumb against the condensation on my glass.

The mayor came and put his head on my lap. I scrubbed him good behind the ears again, and his tail assaulted the floor. THUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMP—

I gave a one-shouldered shrug. “I can do it. Everyone else has things to do, and anything I can do to help out . . . I don’t know if you know this, but I’ve been kind of MIA for the last ten years,” I added sarcastically.

Bullied. Called ghoulie behind my back. My social media was bombarded, day after day, with memes and names and joking questions of “Can you solve the Black Dahlia next?” And “Do you commune with the devil?”

Or, more commonly, liar.

All because I helped a ghost solve his own murder when I was thirteen—too young to know better but too old to chalk it up to imaginary friends.

A knot formed in my throat. “I know.”

But it was still nice to hear.

Seaburn sighed. “You don’t have to do everything alone, love.”

But oh, it was easier that way.

I searched around the side of the veranda. It was a warm evening, and it brought quite a few lightning bugs out of hiding. They blinked between the blooming rosebushes and the hydrangeas in the garden.

Outside, I found Fetch—and a friend.

Ben was sitting in one of the rocking chairs, and Fetch had gone up and put his head on the armrest. Ben tried to pet him, but his fingers passed through the dog’s ears, and he quickly jerked his hand away.

Fetch wagged his tail, anyway.

Dogs were pretty good judges of character. And I hated to admit that it was nice to see Ben, and see him not . . . losing it. Like he did earlier. Because real emotions were complicated. If someone started crying, I started crying with them, and it turned into a whole ordeal—like with Ben. Oh, that was mortifying.

I put my hands into my jean pockets, steeled my nerves, and wandered closer to him. “So, you like dogs, Mr. Andor?”

He seemed surprised that I’d noticed him because no one else had. “Oh—ah, Ben, please.”

Oh yeah, Ben was definitely a dog kind of guy. Nailed it.

Fetch whined and I clicked my tongue to the roof of my mouth. He came trotting over and I scrubbed him behind the ears. He licked at my hand.

The night was soft and warm, like most spring nights in the South. There was still the undeniable snap of the last of winter’s chill, but the lightning bugs were already out and performing loops in the garden outside. The moon was so bright, it looked almost like a silvery daytime, and a group of kids played kickball in the street.

There wasn’t much to Mairmont. It was quiet, and the traffic was token, and the cicadas buzzed so loud you could barely think.

I don’t know why I said what I said next—maybe it was the buzzing of the insects, or the kids kicking a ball down the street, or the two glasses of rum and Coke, but I said, “Dad used to say these kinds of nights were best for a good moonwalk.”

Ben gave me a peculiar look. “A moonwalk?”

I bit my lip to keep the smile from my face. He had a point. But him asking was . . . unexpected. And I didn’t know what it was—probably the rum and Cokes—but it might’ve also been the way the silvery moonlight fell across his face, and the way his hair was a little floppy and his eyes were dark and deep and not at all cold or cruel, like I’d imagined in my head. As though he was actually looking at me, really looking, and wanted to know me and this weird life I lived. No lies, no walls of fiction—only this strange little secret no one knew.

And, anyway, I did need a change of scenery.

15

The Sorrows of Florence Day

ST. JOHN’S OF Mairmont Cemetery was a tiny little patch of green grass surrounded by an old stone wall. There were tombstones that stuck out of the gentle hills like white teeth. Some had flowers bursting from them; others hadn’t been touched in decades. The cemetery was shadowed by oak trees that were large enough and thick enough that I was sure they’d been here long before any of the bodies below the lawn. And sitting in each one of them, perched so comfortably, were crows. A whole murder of them. Sitting in the budding branches and looking down at us with their beady little eyes, nestled in to watch us.

The wrought iron gates were closed and locked, but that had never stopped me before from creeping in. There was a crumbling wall about twenty feet down from the gate that I could get a foothold in and haul myself over.

I pointed at the wall. “I’m scaling that sucker.”

He gave me a level look. “That’s not the point.”

I rolled my eyes and put my feet into the old climbing holds that I’d chiseled out when I was teenager, and began to work my way up six feet to the top, where I looped my leg over and straddled it. “You coming or am I going for a walk alone?”

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other as he debated. Ran the numbers. Debated his options. His shoulders were stiff, his eyebrows furrowed, as if it were more than just breaking into a cemetery that stopped him.

I swung my leg back over. “We don’t have to, you know,” I said, softer. “We can go to a park if you aren’t comfortable. Or—the Ridge?”

I couldn’t believe I just suggested that.

He shook his head. “No, it’s fine. It’s just . . . there aren’t others? In the graveyard? Others like me, I mean.”

He pointed at me. “That.”

I glanced back at the graveyard. The moon was so full and so bright, I could see from the gates to the far wall, and all of the off-white mausoleums and gravestones in between. “No, I don’t see anyone—wait. Are you scared of ghosts?”

He stiffened. “No.”

He said that way too quickly.

He snorted a laugh. “Good to know.” Then he took a deep breath and said, “No, I don’t go back on my word. This isn’t turning out how I expected but—things rarely do, don’t they?”

It sounded like he was referring to his own predicament. He couldn’t have been much older than I was, and he was dead. He had plans—everyone has plans, even if they don’t realize it. Even the ones who go because they think they don’t have plans. There’s always something that comes up.

I wondered what he regretted, what parts of his life he wished he’d done differently.

I wondered if my dad had any regrets when he went, too.

A moment later, he stepped through the wall and shivered. “That feels so weird,” he complained, dusting invisible lint from his crisp button-down shirt. “I don’t like it. It tingles. In weird places.”

I headed up toward the path that looped the whole cemetery, and called back to him, “You’re a terrible ghost.”

He caught up in a few quick strides, and fell into pace beside me. Lee never did that. He always expected me to match his. “Right,” he said, “about that. I have questions.”

I took a deep breath. “Okay. I’ll try to answer them.”

He quickly looked away. “Is this . . . post-living part of your life a family business?”

I laughed at that. “No. My family owns the funeral home in town, but only me and my dad can see spirits. Ghosts. Whatever you want to call them—you. I don’t know why. Maybe it has something to do with the funeral parlor? Who knows.”

I barked a laugh. “If only! No one believed me, Ben. Bestcase, they thought I was doing it for attention, worst case they thought I had something to do with the murder. Imagine being thirteen and on the witness stand and having to say, ‘A ghost told me.’ It was . . .” I tried not to remember much about that year if I could help it. The articles about me, the weird news stunt, the people calling me a liar. “Anyway, most people thought it was just a wild story. I guess it makes sense—I’d wanted to be a writer ever since I was little. I like words. I like shaping them. I like how the stories you create can be kind and good, and I like how they can never fail you, if that’s how you make them.” I kicked a rock, and it skittered off into the grass. “Or, you know, in theory.”

I bit my thumbnail as we walked on in silence. The only sound was my footsteps soft on the grass.

After a while he said, “I liked that about your first book.”

Surprised, I turned to him. “Rake?”

My eyes widened. “You didn’t.”

I wasn’t sure how much of that I believed. First Seaburn said he read it, then Ben—two people who didn’t know each other. Once my dad had said, “Don’t worry, buttercup, your book will find the people it needs to,” but I didn’t believe him.

I was beginning to second-guess myself.

We mingled among the tombstones. I knew where Dad’s plot would be. It was already sectioned off at the top of the hill, under the large oak tree where the crows perched. I sat down on one of the stone benches throughout the cemetery, and Ben took a seat beside me.

I outstretched my hands toward the graveyard. “So? Worth it, right? One of the best views in Mairmont.”

He pressed his mouth into a thin line, and his lips twisted a little. “I mean, it still isn’t worth the trespassing charge but . . . it’s nice.”

I bit in a grin, and pulled my feet up under me to sit cross-legged. The sky unfurled in front of us, infinite and dark. The stars were much brighter here—so bright I almost forgot that you didn’t need light out here in nowhere. The stars gave you all the light you needed. “Dad used to sneak in here with me when I was a kid. We’d stroll the graveyard. He called it his exercise. Sometimes when the ISS would pass overhead, we’d come out here and watch it. We’ve seen loads of comets and space junk falling in the sky. You really can’t beat a view like this.”

He cocked his head. “True, he isn’t really the graveyard type. I always thought it was strange how he wrote a contemporary gothic horror.”

I stiffened. “Right—you know him. Lee Marlow.”

No, but I was never going to tell him that I recognized him, too, when I first saw him the other day. “Was that also why you were at that writing bar the other night?”

I made a face. “God forbid it’s legible.”

He chuckled. It was a warm, throaty sound that reminded me of red velvet cake. In a book, I would’ve called it a delicious sound. “Did you read it?” he asked. “Marlow’s book.”

Ben winced. “He probably thought that meant a strong female character.”

I threw up my hands. “I know, right? A woman can be emotional and vibrant and love things. That doesn’t make her weak or inferior—argh! I’m not going to rant about it, it’ll just make me upset,” I added, forcing my hands down by my sides again. A blush crept over my cheeks. “Not that I care what he wrote. At all.”

It’s not like he wrote me into his book. I wasn’t that dry and salty. At least I didn’t think I was.

And I definitely wasn’t apathetic.

He nodded, agreeing. “In my experience, women with sharp tongues usually have soft lips.”

His gaze lingered on my lips. “Not often enough.”

My ears began to burn with a blush, and I glanced away from him. He was a ghost, Florence. Very much dead. And off-limits. “You know, if I was any other kind of person, I’d ask you to haunt Lee Marlow’s hipster ass.”

That surprised me. “Am I that obvious?”

He tilted his head. “Well, you’re almost finished with it, right?”

Suddenly, a flashlight blinded me. I shielded my eyes with the back of my hand and winced away from the blaringly bright light. There was the crunch of gravel, and the jingle of keys. Shit. I hadn’t even noticed him unlocking the cemetery gate or coming inside. I’d been too wrapped up in flirting with this ship called Disaster.

I dove behind the bench. Ben hid with me.

The police officer called out to us, but I pressed my finger to my lips and told Ben to be quiet. He wasn’t going to trick me this time. I was an adult. With a functioning and fully formed brain this time!

Well, mostly functioning. On good days.

The officer walked closer, over the dark grassy hill, toward us. While I didn’t have any outstanding warrants, I did absolutely have a parking ticket I hadn’t paid in ten years. I didn’t want to think about what that cost now. Never mind the other misdemeanors I had on my record. Starting a fire at school. Stealing Coach Rhinehart’s golf cart. Trespassing in the Mairmont County Museum . . .

Enough to make me a public nuisance.

Suddenly, with a startled caw, the murder of crows sitting in the oak tree took flight at the same time. They scared Officer Saget, who cursed and ducked as they swooped in and broke out into the night sky. Then I saw Ben try to grab for my wrist, but his hand passed through it. He looked momentarily annoyed.

He didn’t have to tell me twice. I turned on my heels and leapt into a sprint toward the back of the cemetery, cutting around tombstones and fake flowers propped up against plaques, and headed for the back corner. It got darker the farther we ran, and a little sliver of wall had fallen down behind the old oak there—

I slipped through the crumbled wall and broke out onto Crescent Avenue, and hopped through a few backyards until I returned to the cross street with the inn. I didn’t stop to catch my breath until I was inside the wrought iron gates and halfway down the path to the front door.

I could’ve kissed him. “Thank you.”

The tips of his ears burned red and he looked away. “You’re welcome.”

Trying to hide a grin, I wandered up the cobblestone path to the front door when I paused on the porch steps where we began, and glanced back at Ben. “I’m sorry,” I said, “that I lied to you about getting caught in the cemetery.”

I frowned. “Not that I know of, but I never asked.”

I already had one dead person to mourn. Common sense told me that I shouldn’t get involved with Ben, that my heart couldn’t take another goodbye so soon, but I think I’d already decided to help him. I wasn’t sure when I decided—yesterday? When he first showed up at the front door?

I was foolish, and I was only going to hurt myself, because if I knew anything about death, the goodbyes were harder with ghosts than corpses.

16

Songs for the Dead

SATURDAY ROLLED INTO Sunday, and I tried to convince Mom to let me help out with the funeral today—the second-to-last one Dad scheduled before he died—but she adamantly refused the entire breakfast. I hadn’t been to a funeral in years. The dirges, the gospels, the crying widows and the grieving kids and the parents who had to bury their children and—

The ghosts.

I pulled on an NYU sweatshirt and texted Mom, Are you sure?

One more word and I will ground you, Mom texted back with a heart emoji.

Well, fine then.

Speaking of ghosts, I hadn’t seen my resident haunt yet today, not even as I went downstairs to grab a bagel and some cream cheese from the breakfast selection in the dining room. (Second breakfast was always my favorite meal of the day.) I smeared a large helping of cream cheese onto my bagel, humming along with the morning radio murmur in the corner of the room. I poured myself coffee in a to-go cup and made my way back into the foyer.

I gave a yelp. Sitting at the front desk, his head propped up on his hand, was John. And beside him, leaning smugly against the desk, was Officer Saget.

He didn’t get a read on my face last night. He didn’t know it was me.

John watched the exchange back and forth like a badminton tournament, putting a bookmark into his current manga to watch.

He pursed his lips. His nostrils flared. But then, after a moment, he seemed to think better of his strategy. “You get off this once—this once, Florence. If it were anywhere else, I’d be getting you for trespassing. Try to act your age, okay?” he warned, and bid John goodbye, before he left out of the front door, climbed into his police car illegally parked on the curb, and drove away.

I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding. “Shit, that was close.”

John gave me a look. “Oh, girl, you just love chaos, don’t you.” This morning he had his red beard braided down his front like a Viking, and his pizza baseball cap again.

Chuckling, he shook his head. On an embroidered doggie bed beside the front desk was our mayor. He looked up, his tail pat-pat-patting on the ground. I scrubbed him behind the ears. “So, I got a question.”

He checked his smart watch. “I’m sure it’ll be open for lunch in a few minutes. They’ve got pretty good cheese dogs. And their Tater Tots are—” He mimicked an A-OK signal. “Why don’t you take the mayor with you? He’s due for an inspection of those tots, anyway.”

I guessed that Seaburn was helping out with the funeral, so the least I could do was bring his dog along. “Sure. Mayor, wanna go with me?” The dog popped to his feet. “Then let’s go! Thank you, John!”

I wasn’t looking forward to today’s tasks. While Carver and Alice were helping Mom, I had to figure out how to do Dad’s impossible tasks. I already miserably failed at trying to get the flowers yesterday. I couldn’t wait to fail at finding Elvis today.

At least I had a good companion with me.

But the flower shop owner did give me a lead, and while he wasn’t exactly Elvis, I knew my dad well enough to know that he didn’t always mean what he said, and thank god Bar None actually did keep strict operational hours, because I got there right at ten in the morning.

I let myself in, the mayor at my heels. There was a DOGS SHOULD VOTE sign inside the bar, and I took that as permission enough to let the best dog in with me. A man stood behind the bar prepping for the day.

Dagger, meet heart. “You got me,” I replied with a practiced smile.

I shook it. “Thanks. Um, I have a weird question for you. Mr. Taylor down at the flower shop said that there was an Elvis that plays here some nights?”

I glanced behind him to the poster he was referring to, and found myself staring at an aged-out version of Elvis in glittery sequins, about to eat a microphone. “Oh, that’s—exciting?”

The chef poked his head out. “Yeah, boss?”

Bruno’s dark eyes lit up like firecrackers on the Fourth of July. He quickly exited the kitchen, wiping his hands on his pristine white apron. “Well, I’ll be! Florence Day!” His voice was velvety smooth. I had a feeling he was— “Your dad came to watch me sing every Thursday. Before the poker games,” he added when confusion crossed my brow.

We shook, and he sat down on the stool beside me. Perez, the bartender, asked if I wanted a drink, and I told him a lemonade would be nice. Bruno said, “Your old man never missed a night—and when he didn’t come on Thursday, we knew something was wrong,” he said. “I’m sorry. I know it’s not much and it’s not a great word to express the shit that’s happened, but it’s all I got.”

The bartender slid over a lemonade, and I curled my fingers around the cool, moist glass. The ice shifted, condensation pearling on the outside like rain droplets. He said, “Your dad always raved about you.”

Bruno nodded. “Always said you were up in the big city, chasing your dreams. That you could write words that could wake the dead.”

I felt heat nibble at my cheeks. Of course Dad would say something like that. He didn’t even know that I ghostwrote—that those books were sold in airport bookstores and at grocery store checkout counters—

And . . . now I couldn’t tell him at all.

Ever.

He paused. “Xavier swore me not to tell anyone, but I gotta know if it’s true that—”

I frowned. “Know if what’s true?”

Bruno instead said, “He was so proud of you, Miss Day. So fuckin’ proud he cried. He knew you were chasing your dream, like Carver and Alice, and he was so damn proud of all you kids.”

But he never knew the full story. I never told him that I pulled inspiration from his and Mom’s romance, that I memorized all of the stories they told me of their grandparents, all the love stories they had passed down from generation to generation. I had been so caught up with being the exception to the rule—the one family member who would never have a glorious love story—that I’d forgotten why I wrote about love.

Because a gray-haired woman in an oversized sweater asked me to, yes, but also because I wanted to. Because I believed in it, once upon a time.

I took a deep sip and shook my head. “No,” I replied, and winced because my voice was anything but convincing. “I actually came to ask you a question about Dad. Would you be available Thursday around three?”

Bruno blinked at me. Once. Twice. Then he leaned forward and asked, “Lemme get this straight: You want me to sing at your father’s funeral.”

His bushy black eyebrows shot up. “Huh.”

That took me back. “And your going rate?”

The man grinned, and finally I noticed that his left canine was gold plated. “Miss Day, Elvistoo honors the dead for free.”

17

Dead Hour

I CURLED MY fingers around the wrought iron gate to the cemetery. It was already locked—I forgot that it closed most evenings at 6 P.M.—and I didn’t really want to walk the graveyard tonight, but I didn’t know where else to go. There was a storm rolling in. Lightning lit the bulbous clouds in the distance, and there was a distinct smell in the air.

Damp and fresh, like clean laundry hung out to dry.

Thunder rumbled across the hills of the cemetery.

A golden wedding ring.

His? Or someone else’s? I didn’t know why, but I was startled by it. I really knew nothing about him, did I? I didn’t know why it bothered me. I never cared before what kind of jewelry ghosts wore. Silly, I chastised myself, letting go of the gate, and turned to him. “Yeah. Storm’s coming in, anyway.”

He inclined his head toward the clouds. “You can tell?”

Again, he said my name, and again each vowel curled a chill up my spine in a not-too-unpleasant sort of way. It was actually very pleasant. I liked the way he said my name. I liked that he even said it. Lee only ever called me bunny this and bunny that.

But oh, what power there was when Ben said my name.

A gust of wind scattered a few green leaves. I pushed my hair behind my ear, to keep it out of my face, while it blew right through him. It didn’t ruffle his hair, or his clothes. He was stagnant, forever like this. A portrait now, something never to be changed. Like my dad—forever sixty-four. His experiences ended. His life frozen.

Ben put his hands in his pockets and began, “You know, I’ve been thinking about our conversation in the graveyard.”

I stared at him. Blinked. And then burst out laughing.

He looked indignant. “It’s not that funny.”

My laughter quickly died in my throat. It suddenly wasn’t funny anymore. It was personal. I pursed my lips. “You’re not the Ghost of Christmas Past, Ben.”

We passed the ice cream shop, where a kid and her father sat at the table by the window sharing an ice cream sundae. When I was little, and Carver and Alice were littler, Dad used to take me to the parlor and split with me a chocolate bowl with sprinkles on top.

I wished I could ask Dad about how to help Ben. He would’ve known. The only lead I had was the manuscript but . . . I didn’t know how to fix that. And if that was why Ben was sticking around, then I was afraid we were both shit out of luck.

And I was annoyed that Ben would even . . . that he would even propose that I . . . that he was here to—

Argh!

I tried love. It didn’t work. The end. There were bigger things in my life that I had to tackle than something so frivolous.

He gave a start. “Presley? Is he . . . a ghost?” he asked in an almost whisper.

Oh, why was that charming? Why was that so charming?

I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from grinning, because I was still annoyed with him. “No”—I took out a poster from my back pocket and unfolded it to show him exactly which Elvis I was referring to—“but he’s the next best thing.”

He held a hand over his mouth to hide a laugh. “An impersonator? For a funeral?”

I smiled at the thought of Dad going to watch Bruno perform before his Thursday night poker games—and then my smile faded as I remembered that he never would again. I folded my arms over my chest and said curtly, “He was.”

We walked the next three blocks in silence, passing the bookstore with a poster of When the Dead Sing by Lee Marlow, and I lingered only for a moment. Only long enough for Ben to glance back to see why I’d stopped, and then I made myself put one foot in front of the other, and ignore the poster, the release date. Only a few more months before the whole world read my story ruined by his words.

I stared through the window at the stacks of romance novels, with Ann Nichols’s new books at the top. The ones I wrote—Midnight Matinee, A Rake’s Guide—all of them. Dad walked by this bookstore every day on his daily lunch breaks to Fudge’s. He must’ve seen this display, these books. I wondered if he ever ducked into the store and bought one. I wondered if Mom loved the dry humor in Nichols’s new ones. Mom and I never really talked about books after mine failed. I didn’t want to talk about books at all after that.

I turned to keep walking, when Ben backtracked and nodded his head toward the door. “Let’s go in.”

I had half a mind to not follow him, but a part of me wondered what section he gravitated toward. Literary? Horror? I couldn’t even imagine him in the romance aisle, towering and broody in his pristine button-down shirts and ironed trousers.

The bell above the door rang as I stepped into the cozy bookstore. The woman behind the counter, Mrs. Holly, had been there for twenty-odd years. She looked up from her book with a smile. “Well, I’ll be damned! Florence Day.”

Even my local booksellers back in Jersey didn’t know my name, but it seemed like a decade away couldn’t erase me from small-town memory. Everywhere I went it was “Holy smokes, Florence Day!” like I was Mairmont’s local celebrity. Well, I guess I was.

Have you seen a ghost float through, by any chance? Six foot sexy, with just the slightest hint of nerd? I wanted to ask, but instead went with, “Just looking.”

Riveting.

Of course he couldn’t write small towns. He’d never lived in one—he thought every small town was either Stars Hollow or Silent Hill. There was no in-between.

I stiffened.

I told Mrs. Holly I wanted to browse, and made my way back through the aisles of memoirs and self-help, past sci-fi and fantasy, to the back corner of the store where the paperback romances were. And there was Ben, looking through the used romances with cracked spines and dog-eared pages.

His mouth twisted into a grin, as if I’d said something funny. “If I’ve learned anything as an editor over my last ten years, it’s that you never really hear of the good ones.”

I roamed my gaze across the shelves—the Christina Laurens and the Nora Robertses and the Rebekah Wetherspoons and the Julia Quinns and the Casey McQuistons—until my eyes settled on the most familiar spine. I took it out for him. There were only two on the shelf. I wondered how much longer Mrs. Holly would be able to stock it before she couldn’t find it anymore. Ardently Yours.

I smoothed my hand across the cover, across the embellished font and the laminated gloss. I remembered how much I loved this book. How every word sounded like a heartbeat, how every turn of phrase was a love song.

He didn’t answer at first. I glanced up to see if he’d even heard me, and to my surprise he wasn’t even looking at the book. He was looking at—at me, with this soft, quiet sadness that made my stomach twist.

My eyes burned, and I quickly looked away, and wiped the tears with the back of my hand. They were words I didn’t think I needed to hear. Lee Marlow had never said as much—he said it was fluffy, it was lighthearted. It was candy, though even candy could be good—sweet and flavorful and exactly what you needed exactly when you needed it. But he never said as much.

Rose never understood why I was so wrapped up in what Lee thought of my books, but didn’t you want someone you loved to respect what you wrote? Lee was supposed to be the closest person I had. He was supposed to tell me it was good, that it was worthy—and that I was worthy of that praise.

But instead it came from a stranger I barely knew.

Ben reminded me of Ann in that way. She’d sat down at my table, and with a certainty as if she already knew that my words were worthy, she asked me to write her romances. She gave me a gift I never thought I’d get. And through her I wrote the stories I wanted to read, and it was so powerful—

I took a deep breath, and put my book back on the shelf. “I don’t know how to finish Ann’s manuscript.”

He cocked his head. “What do you mean?”

He was quiet for one heartbeat, then two, then three. And then I saw his shined loafers stop in front of me, and when I looked up he had bent down a little, his hands in his pockets, and he was smiling, “Thank you. Annie would like that. And I’ll help you however I can.”

And I recognized that kind of smile, finally. The kind you didn’t really show to strangers. The kind you kept to yourself because the world had been shit, and your heart had been broken so many times by different people and places and stories. He had stories, too. The wedding ring on a chain around his neck. The way he fit his hands into his pockets to look as small as possible. The reason he loved romance.

And for the first time since I cried about Lee in Rose’s matchbox-sized apartment with a bottle of wine and a half-eaten pizza, my hair still wet with rain, I wanted to learn a new story. I wanted to read the first chapter in the life of Ben Andor and figure out the words that built his heart and soul. And okay, yeah, maybe also his six-foot-three frame, but honestly even if I wanted to climb him, I couldn’t because he was very much a ghost and I would go right through him.

I wasn’t very good at climbing, anyway.

We left the bookstore after I’d bought the new Sarah MacLean historical romance, and Ben walked me home the last two blocks. By then the storm was at the edge of town.

He cocked his head. “As in anyone I’ve left behind?”

I gave a start. “No one?”

I forced myself to look away. Down the street. Seaburn was walking the mayor, and I waved to them as they passed. No one. There was a weight to those words. I’d always operated alone, but I knew I had family—Alice and my dad and Rose and Carver. But to be really alone. I’d spent my life with safety nets. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to walk a tightrope without them, and then when you finally fell . . .

No one.

I tried to not flinch away from the thought, but it stayed with me. Because loneliness was the kind of ghost that haunted you long after you were dead. It stood over your plot in the cemetery where a lone name sat carved in marble. It sat with your urn. It was the wind that carried your ashes when no one claimed your body.

He gave a shrug. “I’m not great with surprises. I don’t—didn’t—take chances. I didn’t take risks. On anything—or anyone.” He hesitated, and then corrected himself, “Almost anyone. And I was fine with that life. I’d even planned on what would happen should I die before forty, I just . . . didn’t think it’d happen. I would’ve expedited a lot of my long-term plans,” he added, trying to joke.

I didn’t find it funny, for once. “You can’t plan for everything.”

He slid his cool brown gaze toward me. “The one thing you don’t believe in, Florence.” Then he shook his head and said, “I guess if everyone found their big love, then the world wouldn’t be such a terrible place most of the time, eh?”

He snorted and walked through the gate. “I do, too.”

At the counter inside, Dana was reading a novel by Courtney Milan at the desk, and I waved at them as I passed up toward my room.

Ben said, “Sweet dreams.”

Dana said, “Night!”

I left up the stairs and went to my room and fell onto my bed.

That night, as the storm blew over Mairmont, I tried to listen to the dead sing through the trees, but as the wind bent the limbs and scraped across the rooftop, all I could hear was the rain. And all I could think about was Ben Andor in the bookstore, bending ever so slightly to me with a lopsided smile, thanking me for trying.

No one had ever thanked me for that before. For trying. Even though I was failing. Even though Ann’s expectations loomed over me like this huge, dark thundercloud. I didn’t want to disappoint her, and I was beginning to realize how much I didn’t want to disappoint Ben, either. But more than that, though, I wanted to finish that manuscript so he’d know that he wasn’t some empty Sharpie unable to leave a mark. He left them wherever he went, even if he couldn’t see them.

Even if no one told him, “Thank you for trying.”

18

The Undertaker’s Daughters

MONDAY MORNING WAS another breakfast with the family.

I missed it, weirdly enough, when I was in New York. And now that I was back, for however short a time, I’d sunk back into the well-oiled machine of my family like I’d never left. Alice and I didn’t even snap at each other when we sat down for breakfast, even though I was still salty from that last chapter. I’d tried to write again when I woke up but—it was the same problem. Jackson didn’t get struck by lightning this time, but I still didn’t know how to make Amelia stay.

Alice, on the other hand, seemed to be having some trouble of her own.

That caught my attention, and I looked up from my first cup of coffee. The caffeine was beginning to fire off those synapses in my brain. “You ordered the wrong concealer?”

Alice glared at me. “No! The company sent me the wrong refill. And it’s stage makeup, so it isn’t like I can go to CVS and get a new jar. Ugh, this is a nightmare,” she added, putting her face in her hands. “First I ran out of embalming fluid last night, and now this.”

Mom patted her on the shoulder. “Murphy’s Law, hon.”

Just as I always wanted to be a writer, my little sister always wanted to be a mortician. Ever since I could remember, she’d followed Dad like a shadow. She went to Duke for forensic chemistry, and on weeknights, just for fun, she got her mortuary sciences and funeral services degree online. A part of me always thought that it was Alice who should’ve inherited Dad’s gift. She would’ve been so much better at it, and I doubt she would’ve been run out of town because of it. She was the kind of person to tackle things head-on. Nothing frightened her. Especially after I solved that cold case, and everything got worse. She fought people on my behalf. Another reason why I wanted to leave as quickly as possible when I graduated high school—so she didn’t feel obligated to anymore.

Alice said quickly, “No.”

She looked up from her plate, and I instantly realized I’d said the wrong thing. “Oh? Are we going to talk about this now?”

My entire body went rigid. “No—what does she mean? What do you mean, talk about this now? What’s your problem, Al?”

That wasn’t true. I knew it wasn’t true. They loved coming to visit me during the holidays—they’d said as much! And Dad never once asked me to come home, not once—

She turned her eyes to the ceiling tiles, then closed them and took a deep breath. “Your father never wanted you to come back when you weren’t ready.”

A sinking feeling burrowed into the pit of my stomach.

I didn’t feel hungry anymore.

Mom said patiently, “Florence, you know she didn’t mean that—”

The thing was, Alice wasn’t wrong.

It was another argument we had been avoiding—for years. And now all of them were bubbling up to the surface.

Not only that, but I had my dead editor to contend with, Dad’s funeral preparations, and Ann’s manuscript. Everything all at once.

I hated complicated.

When I got back to the bed-and-breakfast, John waved at me without looking up from his Spider-Man comic. I climbed the stairs back to my room, and decided that a long and relaxing shower was exactly what I needed. Head empty, water hot, nothing but the white noise of the shower echoing in my brain. I didn’t want to think right now. Not about anything.

So I pulled out my NYU sweatshirt again and picked up my jeans from the floor, and laid them out on the bed before I went for the claw-foot tub with a shower. As it turned out, thankfully, the inn didn’t skimp on water temperature. I let it get as hot as I could—hot enough to boil me alive, exactly how I liked it—and stood under the spray for a long time. Until the steam was thick and the constant shower of water over my head quieted all the buzzing thoughts in my head and my skin was flushed and my fingers began to shrivel.

Too long, probably.

The soap smelled like butterscotch, and I tried not to think. It reminded me of the way Ben smelled in his office, and I tried to stop thinking. How his eyes looked when he had bent toward me and thanked me, warm and soft and ocher. His shirtsleeves rolled up to expose muscular forearms. How he was so big, and his hands were big, and how they would feel against my body, cupping my breasts, his lips pressed against mine, tasting like spearmint and—

No.

I flung my eyes open. Shampoo suds leaked into my eyes, and I cursed and put my face into the hot water to rinse them out.

No, no, no, Florence. He was dead.

He was very, very dead.

So why now of all times?

Why him?

Because he was someone very safely dead. Someone so very out of reach. And I was that fucked up.

When the water started to finally get cold, I finished washing the suds out of my hair and got out of the shower. The entire bathroom was still so foggy, I had to use my towel to wipe off the mirror.

Something materialized out of the corner of my eye. In front of the bathtub.

I looked—and let out a scream.

Ben spun around to face me—and yelped, covering his eyes. I clambered to cover my . . . bits, but I must’ve grabbed the world’s smallest towel because I kept having to shift between covering my nips and my bush, and after a few rotations I realized there wasn’t a good answer here. So I grabbed the shower curtain and wrapped that around me instead.

I gave another frustrated cry, wanting to drown myself in the tub instead. “I just wanted two seconds of quiet,” I moaned forlornly to myself, and finally unraveled from the shower curtain. The tiny towel had failed me.

It had failed me so deeply.

I wrapped my arms around my breasts, feeling my ears turn red with embarrassment. I can’t believe he saw me naked. After I’d—

Oh god.

No one had ever called my breasts perfect before. A handful, sure, but perfect?

I reckoned they weren’t terrible.

Complimenting my boobs didn’t excuse him from looking, though. The perv. He didn’t just look, he stared, like he’d been thirsty for years and hadn’t seen a watering hole. Well, my—I was not a watering hole. He was very dead; he did not get thirsty.

I wasn’t even entertaining this.

When I finally changed into my waist-high mom jeans and oversized NYU sweatshirt, looking like the pinnacle of unfuckability, there was a text waiting from my sister.

It said three simple words, but I felt like I was being asked to move a mountain:

Write Dad’s obituary.

19

A Dying Practice

Xavier Vernon Day was a loving husband, father, and friend. He grew up in Mairmont, where he inherited the Days Gone Funeral Home and became a paragon and beloved beacon in the community. He is survived by his wife, Isabella, and his three children, Florence, Carver, and Alice Day. He was . . .

My fingers fell silent against the keyboard. He was, what? Dead? Very. And this didn’t sound like the kind of obit he would want to have shared in the Daily Ram, Mairmont’s local paper.

I pushed my laptop back with a frustrated sigh, and reached for my coffee—when Ben materialized right into the seat. I jumped in surprise, spilling my drink. The waitress at the diner gave me a strange look before she rushed to grab a towel to help me clean it up.

After the waitress was gone, I glared at him. “Well if you’d stop just popping up in places, I wouldn’t be so startled, now would I?”

He coughed to hide a chuckle, and glanced away, his cheeks burning red. “It was just as awkward for me.”

The waitress came by to refill my coffee mug.

Ben frowned and waved his hand through the steam rising from my mug. It passed right through his fingers. “It feels weird when I disappear. Like I know something happens but I can’t remember exactly what.”

I took a sip of coffee. Oh god, too strong. I dumped half the world’s sugar supply into it, and tasted it again. Better. “Maybe you go nowhere.”

He leaned forward a little bit, as if to try to look at my computer screen.

I angled it downward. “Rude.”

I was definitely not.

I sat back and rubbed at the line between my brows. The last thing I needed was more wrinkles. “The obit is going about as good as everything else in my life right now, Ben. Fucking terribly.” It wasn’t his fault that I was failing so hard at my dad’s obituary, and the second I raised my voice at him I felt bad. I sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m just . . .”

I missed my dad.

And then it hit me again—this grief that stretched like an endless field of all the things I used to feel for Dad. I was so used to compartmentalizing my life, but now the two bled together, and it made my chest hurt. I was having coffee, writing my dad’s obit, and Dad was dead.

I blinked back my tears and gave him a fake smile. He could see right through it because his dark eyes flickered.

I took out a few bucks for the coffee, closed my laptop, and left.