6. The Death Toll

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.

20

Novel Idea

DANA FIXED ME another rum and Coke when I set up shop at the bar that afternoon. I’d texted Alice after I realized that Dad’s obituary was coming along about as well as literally everything else in my life, and she was very short in replying that it needed to be done by Wednesday.

Amazing. Another deadline I would probably sail right past.

I stared at the computer screen, and knowing I wouldn’t get anything done today—my head felt like cotton balls—I scrolled over to Google.

Benji Andor I typed into the search bar.

I was surprised to find that there weren’t any articles dedicated to his funeral, or at least his passing, but then again, hadn’t he said that he didn’t have any living close relatives? Then who was taking care of his goodbyes? I didn’t know much about Ben at all.

Who was in charge of his funeral?

While I didn’t see anything about his death, he did have a social media account. I clicked on it, and went to his page. It was an older photo of him, not quite smiling but not dour, either, leaning against the railing of a cruise ship. And there was a very pretty redhead standing beside him, smiling, with one of those fruity umbrella drinks in her hand. His page was private, so I couldn’t know who she was, or anything else he might’ve divulged, but the photo was enough to make me feel a little uneasy.

I quickly exited out of the internet, my cheeks burning with embarrassment. “Sorry, I wasn’t prying. I wanted to see if—there was any news yet. About your funeral.”

I shook my head.

He didn’t seem surprised. “I’m sure Laura’s taken the mantle on that. She always liked to be in control of things—not in a bad way. Just in a . . . way.”

He tilted his head, thoughtful for a moment, trying to find the right words. “I’d gone on a business trip to the Winter Institute,” he finally began, “but I caught a cold and came home early. Didn’t tell her because I thought I’d surprise her with a weekend all to ourselves. She was always pointing out how I never had time for her. I was always working. I would edit manuscripts at work, and then I would bring them home, and I would edit them there until I fell asleep.” His eyebrows furrowed. “She was in the shower with a coworker of hers. They’d been seeing each other for a few months at that point.”

I sucked in a breath. “Oh, Ben . . .”

He swallowed thickly and looked away. “She said as much,” he replied. “She asked if we could try again.”

He shook his head.

I didn’t understand. He was clearly still very much in love with her—or at least unable to forget about her. “Why?”

I clenched my hands tightly into fists. If Lee had contacted me once after we’d broken up, if he’d asked to try again, to meet in the middle, I would’ve— “You’re an idiot.”

I rolled my eyes and slammed my laptop closed. “I’ve got to go—do something. But for what it’s worth? You’re wrong.” Then I hopped off my stool and stalked out of the bar and up the stairs to my room, and he didn’t follow. Carver texted me a little while later, while I was pacing back and forth in my hotel room, trying to calm down.

Wanna wash some graves? he asked.

Not really, I replied.

Too bad, sis.

Ugh, fine. After I’d changed clothes into something I wouldn’t mind sweating in, I came back down and peeked into the bar, but Ben was gone.

Good. I was too angry to deal with him right now, anyway.

Carver and Nicki were waiting outside on the porch when I came out. Nicki was a short and stocky man with an angular face and thick black glasses to match his thick black hair and warm brown skin. His family owned a hotel in Cancún, so he understood the trials and tribulations of a family business. I was at least thankful for that—he understood the little nuances in our family, the weight Dad’s death left on us. I was glad Carver had him, especially now.

Carver had always been the one with his heart on his sleeve.

On the front veranda, Carver held up a portable pressure sprayer and a blue bucket filled with sponges and scrapers. “Ready to have some fun?”

He gave a low whistle. “What’s got you all twisted?”

Ben. The fact that he thought it was his fault that—“Nothing. Just work stuff,” I added, not quite lying.

I snorted. “Let’s get going, yeah? The sun’s going to set in an hour and I can’t be there after dark.”

Nicki nodded. “It’s very soothing, and gives your arms a fantastic workout.”

They kissed, and I made a face. “Ugh, gross. True love.”

Carver shook his head. “Nah. I bet she’s about to have a mental breakdown anyway, what with the makeup news from this morning.”

Alice was the only one who didn’t really care to scrub gravestones. When we were little, Dad would sometimes pick us up from school with a bucket in one hand, and a portable pressure sprayer in the other, and tell us that we were going to visit some friends. The friends always turned out to be gravestones in the Mairmont cemetery—the older ones that’d survived through hurricanes and tornadoes and half a century of grime and moss. Their letters half-hidden in time, their dates worn by wind and rain. Dad said they needed love, too, even after everyone who remembered them was dead.

So we spent some afternoons scrubbing gravestones clean. It wasn’t something any of us ever really got out of doing—or wanted to. The cemetery in the afternoon light looked soft and peaceful. In the top left corner, under one of the large oaks, there was a plot taped off. No one had started digging yet, but my throat tightened anyway.

That was where Dad would be.

It looked different in the daylight.

Carver pointed toward the bottom right corner. “Those look pretty grimy. What do you think?”

Carver, Nicki, and I grabbed the scrapers out of the bucket, sudsed our sponges, and went to work. I took the scraper and scraped off all of the grime and moss, and soaked it down with the pressure sprayer. After a while, when I’d finally gotten back into the groove, I’d cleaned it well enough to make out the delicate insets of the face’s eyes.

I laughed at the memory. “Dad was beside himself.”

Alice had always been like that. Quick to come to my rescue, quicker to throw a punch. I never liked confrontation, but Alice loved me, and she hated seeing me bullied. We’d been inseparable for years, but then I left the first chance I got. I didn’t stay.

And that was something I just didn’t know how to talk about with her.

Carver gave me a sidelong look. “You’re thinking about it?”

New York was a great place to live if you had roots there. If you were part of it. But some people weren’t born for steel jungles and the fast-paced lifestyle and—let’s face it—the cost of living. I used to love that I blended in with the crowd, that I was another face among faces, another writer chasing their dreams in the neighborhood coffee shop. But the longer I lived there, the more gum littered the sidewalk and rust crept in.

I didn’t imagine being there forever, but I didn’t know where I wanted to go, or what felt like home. Nowhere really did, if I was honest with myself. Dad always said it was never about the place, but the people you shared it with. In New York, I had Rose—and for a while I had Lee, and for a while it felt like I finally had found home.

Somewhere permanent. Somewhere safe.

Then, in the blink of an eye, I was on the sidewalk with my suitcase in the rain, and Lee was closing the door.

And despite what I told him, if Lee had come to me, asking for a second chance, begging to try again—

I would’ve said yes.

But I wasn’t sure why anymore.

A quiet wind whispered through the dogwood trees. I’d gotten so used to cars and construction and the sounds of people living so close together, I forgot what true silence sounded like. It wasn’t silence at all, but a soft sigh between the gravestones. The steady creak of an old and endless house.

Carver cocked his head. “It would be nice to have you home. But don’t come home because you think you should. Come home because you want to.”

I didn’t know exactly what I wanted.

But it wasn’t what I had.

He eyed me. “Miss Day. Nice to see you.”

I strained to smile. “Lovely evening, Officer.”

As we left the cemetery, Carver tsked. “You’re not even back a week and you’re already getting Saget antsy. Scandalous! What’ll the neighbors think?”

My brother laughed. “You should’ve asked me to come with you. I love moonwalks! Nicki, one time when Florence and I were—what? Twelve? Ten?”

I listened as we walked back along the side street to the main part of town. Most of the shops were emptying out for the evening. Nothing stayed open late here in Mairmont, aside from the Waffle House and Bar None. It was so unlike New York, where everything was busy and frantic all the time. Here it felt like the world was in slow motion. Everything took its time.

I felt like I’d already been here for a year, and it’d only been a few days.

More lies.

Carver opened his mouth to respond, but I turned away before he could—I didn’t need consoling—and I walked into the bed-and-breakfast.

Ben wasn’t around, so I took my laptop out of my room and went down to the bar again, and ordered myself another rum and Coke. I slid onto my barstool and opened my laptop.

Deleted the paragraph I’d written. Cracked my knuckles.

And stared at the blank Word document.

I didn’t know how to form the words for what I wanted to write. I didn’t know how to take all the jumbled feelings in my head and put them onto paper. There weren’t words big enough or strong enough or warm enough to encompass Dad. He was untranslatable.

I was sure someone like Ben, who had words for everything—and always seemed to have the right ones—wouldn’t have had this sort of problem. I bet his brain was as neat and orderly as his desk had been, and his thoughts as ironed as his shirts.

Writing Dad’s obit was a different kind of failure than writing Ann’s books.

One had too many words I wanted to say, and one didn’t have any at all.

I moved my mouse over to File > Open Recent, and scrolled down to the first one. Ann_Nichols_4. I never titled the books until I was almost done, and most of the time the titles came directly from the text itself.

The document opened to where I left off.

A year ago.

I remembered, so viscerally, the beginning of the end. When I had looked on his laptop, convincing myself that I did trust him, but I wanted to know what his book was about. I remembered that he’d gone out for laundry and left his laptop open to the Word document. I remembered setting down my laptop—opened to this very scene—and crawling across the couch to where he had just sat a few minutes before. The space heater hummed softly.

And as I read, my world began to break apart, piece by piece, like a puzzle coming unglued. When he came back to the apartment, his laundry in tow, he froze in the foyer. I didn’t look up from his computer.

As if it would shut me up.

As if it would make everything good again.

Spoiler alert: It didn’t.

How could I write about two characters, Amelia and Jackson, reconciling, trusting each other again when—when I myself couldn’t? One moment I had every grand romantic gesture right at my fingertips, I had faith these two characters would come back together, and I could sow them a happily ever after. But then it felt like the story had been ripped apart at the seams. I didn’t feel them anymore. I didn’t know who they were, this woman who always knew what she wanted, and this world-weary musician with a heart of gold. I didn’t know the kind of love they had, or if they even believed in it.

I knew I didn’t.

Hesitantly, testily, I placed my fingers on the keyboard, feeling the rigid bumps on the F and J keys. It was like stepping back into old, worn shoes that had gone stiff without a partner to dance with.

I took a deep breath.

The only way out was through—

Wait.

I took a big gulp of my drink, and then settled my fingers back into position.

Now I was ready.

Amelia didn’t want to hear his confessions. About the lies he wove about a life he didn’t live. She knew why he left. Why he abandoned her. The facts stuck to her skin like her wet clothes in the rain. He had lied to her—omitted the story that was most stitched into his life as though, if she learned about it, she’d look at him differently.

Well, he was right in that regard. She did learn about his ex-wife, and she did see him differently. “Were you ever going to tell me?” she asked. “About her?”

He hesitated, rubbing nervously at the scar on his hand that she thought was from one of his wild party nights, but had been from the accident. “I didn’t think you’d understand.”

Suddenly, Jackson went pale and dropped dead from all of his lies.

Amelia didn’t want to hear his explanations. “You lied. You wanted to. Why should I trust you now? Why do I still love you?”

I stared at the cursor, but all I could hear was my fight with Lee, our voices growing louder and louder until we were screaming at each other—and I wondered if it was me.

If I had just overreacted. And why couldn’t I get over him? Why did it still hurt?

Why was I so weak?

She gave him a sad, defeated look. “But why you?”

I slammed my laptop shut, cheeks burning. “Rude!”

Dana leaned forward over the check-in counter to give me a puzzled look.

I smiled politely at them and said quieter to Ben, angling my face away from them, “It’s rude to look at someone else’s work.”

Especially when it’s as bad as mine.

He sat back with his arms crossed over his chest. “I have a feeling you are writing from a very raw place right now.”

He visibly winced at that one, and looked a little ashamed of himself. “I thought you were working on your father’s obituary. I didn’t mean to spy on your writing.”

I narrowed my eyes.

He held up his hands in defeat. “I promise, darling, nothing more.”

Darling. A knot caught in my throat and I quickly looked away. I thought I hated all kinds of pet names. Dear, sweetie, honey, but I guessed I hated it when Lee called me bunny, because he said I looked like a startled rabbit when something caught me unawares. He said it was endearing.

It wasn’t.

But then why did the word darling get my heart racing?

He tilted his head, debating quietly. He was choosing his words. I liked that about him, that when words mattered, he thought about them before he said them. “It was . . . nice, actually, to have someone tell me it wasn’t my fault. Even if I don’t agree.”

He smiled a little sadly. “I don’t think it matters anymore.” Because he was dead. I opened my mouth to say something, to console him, to tell him it still did matter, when he said, “So, what has you stuck? Remember: I said I’d help if I could. I’d like to.”

He didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

I drained my rum and Coke. “Okay, so: Here’s my problem. I haven’t been able to write for about a year now. I don’t see the point anymore. I used to believe in love, but I really don’t now. Every time I try to imagine it, I can only think about how mine ended.”

He pursed his lips together, not knowing what to say.

But the worst part?

Dana slid me a shot of something clear with a sad sort of nod and said, “I feel you, sister.”

And I realized that they thought I was talking to myself. Commiserating with myself. Throwing my own solo pity party. And what was a party without a shot or two?

I needed to go for a walk. Get out of here. Do something—anything—else, because clearly writing wasn’t happening today. No kind of writing. At all. I used to write my way out of utter despair, but now I couldn’t even write myself out of a sex scene.

It was embarrassing.

But as I turned to leave, Ben was there.

I jumped.

I looked him up and down. He was such a conundrum. Too tall and too broad and too neatly organized, he didn’t fit into any of the boxes in my head reserved for leading man material. He was doggedly smart, and insistent, and somehow he always ended up being so very polite to me even when he was angry (and I began to tell when he was because a muscle in his jaw would twitch).

I unlocked the door to my room and motioned for him to go inside, and I closed the door after him, and pulled off my NYU pullover. While the night had gotten chilly, the heater in my room definitely worked well.

He smiled, and there was a glint in his brown eyes that turned them almost ocher. “Meet me in the town square. Tomorrow at noon. Don’t be late.” Then he turned on his heels, and departed right through the closed door, and I was left in the quiet room, baffled and a little bit—okay, a lot—intrigued.

What the hell could Benji Andor be up to?

21

The Crime Scene

I YAWNED AND poured myself coffee into a paper to-go cup and dumped half the jar of sugar into it. Without Starbucks right around the corner to give me my triple shot soy chai lattes in the mornings, I had to make do with what I had. Which meant terrible-tasting coffee so sweet the grains of sugar crunched between my molars every time I took a sip.

Last night I couldn’t get to sleep, trying to balance myself somewhere between the sadness that still felt like a rock in my gut, and wondering what the hell Ben had planned. My mind liked to wander at night and shut up in the mornings, at the exact opposite times I needed.

Rose always told me that I was a goblin. I did my best work between ten at night and five in the morning, when most normal people were either asleep or getting down to business (to defeat the Huns). (Sex, I mean sex.) Meanwhile, I was writing about couples banging it out to Fall Out Boy. I missed those days. When I could write. When I didn’t just sleep all day, and stare at my ceiling all night, and scroll through Twitter to see who else in the writing community got book deals and went on tour and hit bestseller lists. It was a certain kind of soul-sucking year I’d had, and I didn’t realize how empty I was until I needed to write.

And by then, I couldn’t.

Last night felt a little different, though, as I stared up at the ceiling of the bed-and-breakfast. What if Ben could help me? What if it was as simple as turning on a switch, and I’d just lost it?

And a deeper part of me asked, How can you think about Ben and writing and books when your dad is dead?

I thought about them because if I thought too much about Dad, that stone in my stomach would weigh me down to the center of the earth, and I’d never crawl out again.

So I sipped on my battery fuel and trained my mind on the thing in front of me—namely, Ben.

The main thoroughfare of the town was already filled with people walking to work, and moms pushing their strollers, and high schoolers playing hooky from school. There was a couple sitting in the gazebo, setting up two cellos, and a man in a business suit reading a newspaper on one of the benches in the green. On the other bench sat a man no one else could see. He was leaning back, his arms folded tightly over his chest, his face turned up toward the sun. Every time I saw him, he looked a little less put together. A button was undone on his shirt, or his shirtsleeves were rolled up, or his hair had fallen out of its gel. This morning it was a little of all three.

I tried not to linger too much on his forearms. He had a tattoo on the underside of his right arm, halfway up toward the elbow, though his arms were folded so I couldn’t see the whole thing. Though I really wouldn’t mind. Some people were shoulder people, some people were back people, some people were butt people—

I, for all intents and purposes, was a forearm kind of girl.

As I watched him, he cracked open an eye to look at me. “You’re late.”

I checked my phone. “By ten minutes!”

He wrinkled his noise. “That sounds disgusting.”

I eyed him. “I’m keeping my zoom-zoom juice.”

He let out a laugh, said, “Fine, fine,” and motioned out toward the center of town. The man sitting on the opposite bench reading the paper. The mothers rolling their strollers to brunch. The kids playing hooky from school. The mayor taking a leak on a fire hydrant. (Hell yeah, stick it to the man, Mayor Fetch!) “This is a trick I learned—just sit and watch people. Set their scene. Imagine who’d they’d be.”

He raised a single thick eyebrow. I hated it. It was so—so perfect.

I looked at him, baffled. “Wow, you’re so wholesome.”

He pursed his lips into a thin line. “Fine,” he replied, and motioned between the two of us, “then set this scene.”

He leaned in close to me—so close that if he were alive, I would be able to smell the cologne he wore, the toothpaste he brushed with, the shampoo he used—and he said in a low voice, “Or maybe she just needs someone to show her that she is.”

The tips of my ears began to heat up. They were turning red. I was turning red.

Stupid Florence. He’s a ghost. He knew he was. And he was professional, goddamn it, and orderly, and very straitlaced. The thought of throwing me onto the bed and ripping off my clothes probably hadn’t even crossed his mind—not once.

Not that it’d crossed mine, either, but . . .

Damn it, I was in trouble.

Then he lifted his eyes a bit beyond me. His eyebrows furrowed. “Is—is that your sister?”

The sound of an engine revved behind me, and I glanced over my shoulder in time to watch Alice peel out of a side alley on Dad’s motorcycle, and disappear down the street. Well, I guessed it was fixed now.

And the noise brought me back to my senses.

This was bad—this scene, this moment, this tightness in my chest—

And he was gone.

22

Grave Matters

STOP THINKING! I chastised myself, slapping my cheeks to wake myself up. Snap out of it. He was dead, I was alive. There were tragedies written with this premise. There were no happily ever afters between an undertaker’s daughter and her ghost.

He knew that. I knew that. I wasn’t going to misread his intentions. He wanted to help me so that he could move on. Ghosts never stayed. It was one goodbye I was accustomed to. Why would he want to stay? Where only I could see him? He wouldn’t. He was being nice.

That was all.

With the flowers still impossible to obtain and Elvis booked for the funeral, it was high time to get the receipt from Dad’s will and visit Unlimited Party. Karen was the head counsel at the local law firm in town, next to the bookstore. I purposefully averted my eyes as I passed the store’s window display and dipped into the brick building at the street corner. Luckily, I caught Karen between clients, so I quickly borrowed the receipt from the files and slipped back out again.

Unlimited Party was a good fifteen minutes away, in a larger strip mall, but at least the Uber driver was quiet. He was listening to a murder mystery podcast—it made me think of Rose. It was one she was obsessed with. She’d seen the ladies live at Comic-Con more than once. I missed her.

What’re you up to? New York still there without me? I texted.

Work must’ve been slow because Rose responded immediately. Somehow. The apartment is SO creepy there alone tho. I miss you.

I’ll be home by the end of the week, I replied quickly.

Take your time! How’s everything back home?

Oh, I guess I hadn’t updated her. So I did. About how finding one thousand wildflowers was somehow a lot harder than it appeared. About how I somehow booked Elvis to sing at my father’s funeral and needed to write Dad’s obituary. About the mysterious letter Dad left for his funeral. And now how I was heading toward Unlimited Party because—well—Dad had beat us to the kazoos and streamers, apparently.

I read down the receipt with a growing despondency. Half of the things were smudged out because sometime between 2001 and today, it had gotten wet. Did he think we were going to throw a frat party instead of a funeral?

Probably, in all honesty.

Your Dad always sounded rad, Rose texted. Then there were dots; she was writing. Then nothing. Then dots again. Finally—Are you doing okay? You know with . . . everything.

Everything. I wished I could tell her about Ben. I wanted to. About the strange, muddled feelings in my chest. I was mourning, but I was blushing. I was so fucking sad, and yet there were moments when the tide would go back out and I wasn’t drowning anymore in it—and they were all moments, I realized, with Ben.

Because of Ben.

He took my mind away from my sadness, when all I wanted to do was burrow myself in that sadness, make a nest of it, live there clinging to what was left of my dad.

Even though Dad would’ve rather me fall in love than fall into a depression.

I’m fine, I texted back, and thanked my driver for the ride as I got out of his Honda.

The cashier at Unlimited Party looked bored as he played a game of solitaire on his phone. I came up to him and handed him the receipt, and gave him a tight smile. “Um, I’d like to pick this up, please.”

My phone vibrated. Rose again? I ignored it.

He asked, dumbfounded, looking at what he had pulled up on his screen. “Uh, are you—are you sure?”

My phone vibrated again. That usually wasn’t Rose’s MO. “Excuse me for a moment?” I asked, and turned around to read the text.

It was from my sister.

COME TO THE FREEZERBOX NOW!!!!

Then, a minute later: PLEASE!!!

When Alice used please, it was an emergency.

The front path was slippery, and I almost bit it hard as I hurried up to the front porch. Carver cracked the front door open as I righted myself again. “That step’s slippery,” he warned.

I stuck out my tongue. “A bit late, bro.”

Was I?

Carver opened the door wider to let me in. “Alice is in the freezer freaking out.”

I shrugged out of my coat as I came in, and realized that Seaburn’s and Karen’s coats were hanging on the rack too—and Mom’s white faux mink jacket. I frowned. “Is there a meeting or something?”

Carver hesitated. “Just some stuff—about the estate and the will.”

He closed the door, and breathed out through his nose. “Florence, it’s nothing personal. You haven’t really been a part of the family business in a few years. And you haven’t come home in a decade. We . . . didn’t think you wanted to be a part of it.”

He rolled his eyes. “Sorry.”

Time was both passing too fast and not fast enough.

The basement door had a latch on the outside, but it was unlocked. When I’d been trapped down there for a night, I hadn’t been afraid of the corpses in the freezers. They were like shells, and when the person was done with them, the shell cracked and broke.

I didn’t start hating corpses until much later. I didn’t like their stillness, or how blue always—always—crept through the heavy foundation, or how they smelled after being, you know, embalmed.

Alice was downstairs, a black-and-white-striped cloth headband in her short hair. She looked like a black smudge in an otherwise soft gray room. Even her latex gloves were black. On the steel table in front of her was—

I fortified myself. It was fine. This was fine.

Alice glanced over her shoulder, and threw up her hands. “Finally! What took you so long?”

No, that was unfair. I couldn’t say it was a corpse because it wasn’t just any shell.

It was Dad.

And Alice had done such a wonderful job, he looked like he was simply sleeping. She already had him dressed in his favorite tux—the tacky red one with the long tails and the golden lapels. He had on his favorite cuff links, gold skulls he bought from some boutique in London several decades ago, and they matched his earrings, and his favorite skull and crossbones and sword rings.

He used to spin those rings when he was anxious—especially the one on his thumb. My eyesight began to blur.

Alice shifted, tapping her foot on the ground. “Well?”

Dad looked like I remembered, a too-still snapshot from my memories, and I curled my fingers into tight fists to keep myself from grabbing his shoulders, shaking him—asking him to wake up. It was the kind of prank he’d pull. Pretend to be dead. Then he’d sit up in the casket at his funeral with a “Surprise! I’m retiring!” but . . . that was the kind of happily ever after in my head. The kind that didn’t exist.

Because the longer I looked, the stiller he seemed. Frozen. Unmoving.

Dead.

Alice went on. “He had a lot of bruises from the hospital, but at least the tux jacket covers most of that, and his cheeks are a little sunken but—the wake’s tomorrow and I think he doesn’t look like himself at all so I keep checking the pictures. Is my memory of him already going or—”

She hesitated.

I rolled my eyes. “Dad looks great. Trust me, you’re good at what you do. Better than Dad, even.”

That, at least, made her a little calmer. “I can never be better than Dad,” she said and crossed her arms tightly over her chest again. She shifted her weight between one foot and the other, staring down at our father. I never could have done what she did. I couldn’t even look at Dad for very long before I burst into tears, so I decided to leave that spectacle for tomorrow.

I’d already cried more times than I could count this week—if I kept this up, I’d die of dehydration myself.

Instead, I bumped my shoulder with Alice’s. “C’mon,” I prodded gently, “you’re done. Dad looks great. Pop him back in the fridge and go watch some anime or something.”

She bit the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling. “Dad used to say that. ‘Oh, just let me pop ’em back in the fridge! I’ll meet you up top’—god, Florence, I miss him.”

I waited for her to return Dad to one of the freezers before we climbed the steps together. Alice locked the basement behind us, and somehow I managed to convince Carver to take her to dinner. They invited me, but I wasn’t really hungry.

I made an excuse. “I’ve got work, sorry.” And it was only a half lie. “The obit won’t write itself.”

I gave her a polite smile. “It’s hard to find words sometimes.”

And suddenly, the comradery we had in the basement melted and she rolled her eyes. “Whatever, just don’t be late on it,” she said, and went to go fetch Karen, Seaburn, and Mom from the kitchen. They decided—loudly—to go to Olive Garden. My family was a lot of weird things, but sometimes they were just predictable. And that was nice.

Carver put on his coat and began to button it up slowly. “You two okay? You and Al?”

He gave me a look. “Listen to your middlest brother for once.”

And the voice of reason. Somehow. The longer I stayed in Mairmont, the deeper the town burrowed into my skin. It was too small and too comfortable and too steeped in everything I loved about Dad. And my family. And why I left. It hurt just being here.

I said, “I will.”

He held up his hand, pinkie out. “Promise?”

Mom lingered for a moment, slipping into her ancient faux mink coat. With it on she reminded me of Morticia Addams and Cruella de Vil and soft winter evenings in the funeral home, closing the curtains and turning out the lights. “Are you sure you don’t want to come eat, Florence?”

The Days Gone Funeral Home never closed before. Not for snowstorms, or hurricanes, or floods.

It was fitting it took Dad’s death to shutter the doors for a few days.

Mom nodded and pulled me into a tight hug, and kissed my cheek. “I can’t see things like you can,” she said, “but I know he’s here.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that he wasn’t. That his ghost didn’t roam the creaky halls and sit in his favorite parlor chair and that the whiff of cigar smoke, strong and sweet, was just her memories playing tricks.

And I was alone.

The funeral home felt so empty, and big, and old. I sat down in the red parlor—Dad’s favorite—in his favorite high-back velvet chair, and sank into the silence. The evening was so quiet, I could hear the wind creak through the old house.

The dead singing.

I wondered if the wind was Dad. I wondered if he was in this gust, or the next one. I wondered if I would ever recognize the sounds through the floorboards, the wind swirling between old oak wood, making sounds that, perhaps, could have been voices.

It all finally became real. This week. This funeral. This world—spinning, spinning, spinning without my father in it.

And the wind rattled on.

23

The Casket of True Love

I glanced up at the voice, quickly wiping the stray tears out of my eyes.

Ben stood in the entryway to the parlor, his hands in his pockets, but all I could see was his faint outline, his face shadowed in the yellow streetlight pouring in through the open windows. Of course he would appear now. When I least wanted him to.

He came into the parlor, his footsteps silent against the hardwood floor. “Is . . . everything okay?”

I took a deep breath. If it wasn’t already obvious . . . “No,” I admitted, “but it’s not really something you can help with. Thank you, though. For asking.” Then, a bit quieter, my voice cracking at the edges: “I miss him. I miss him so much, Ben.”

He came over quietly and sat down on the floor in front of me, and for the first time—ever—he had to look up to meet my gaze, and he gave me something that I hadn’t really thought I wanted: his undivided attention.

What was the song Dad liked? “Only the Good Die Young”?

I was quiet as I tried to think of the right words, afraid to open up. To tell him my story. Ben and I were strangers, and he never knew Dad. Never would. And even though Ben was being decent, and kind, and made me feel like my hurt was worthy of this wasted time—

I was still afraid.

Had I always been this guarded? I couldn’t remember. I’d been closed off for so long, locked tightly, that it just felt safe and natural. I tricked myself into thinking that I could live like that forever, and until Ben showed up, I thought perhaps I could.

But now . . .

He laughed, and I really loved the way he laughed. Soft and deep and sincere, and it made my uptight muscles and my rigid bones relax. It was endearing. I mean, for a dead guy. He leaned against my chair, his head resting on the armrest, eyes closed. I clenched my hands because I wanted to run my fingers through his thick black hair. And I couldn’t.

He tilted his head to the side, thoughtful. “I never wanted to create words, I always wanted to bury myself in someone else’s. But to be honest, I became an editor because I’m chasing this feeling I felt when I read my—” He quickly stopped himself and cleared his throat. “When I read my first romance.”

Ben shifted. He didn’t say anything for a long moment, as if he was debating whether to tell me the truth or tell me at all. I doubted he would lie to me at this point—I didn’t think he could lie his way out of a paper bag if he had to. “The Forest of Dreams.”

That . . . was not what I was expecting. “Seriously? An Ann Nichols novel?”

He shrugged. “I was eleven maybe?”

I gave a half laugh that might’ve also been the remnant of a sniffle. “Admiring you, really. Do you know how healthy it is for a kid to read something other than ‘boy books’ aimed at boys?”

I shook my head. “I’m not that pretty, Ben.”

He gave me a strange look. His eyelashes were long, and the ocher flecks in his brown eyes glimmered in the dim evening light. “But you are.”

My breath caught in my throat. Because here, sitting in the dark with both my mascara and my nose running, he thought I was beautiful? At my worst, selfish and needy and cold?

I quickly looked away.

Suddenly, a gust of wind whistled through the house. The beams creaked; the windows rattled. Ben gave a start.

I didn’t answer. He didn’t really need it.

And when the story was written, I wasn’t any use to him anymore.

A crow cawed somewhere outside. They were perched in the dead oak, unsurprisingly. There was a certain kind of silence that permeated places of death. The sound was closed and private, as if the spaces where the dead were honored were separate from the rest of the world. When I was younger and my brain was full of anxious spirals, I would lie down on the floor between funerals, and press my cheek against the cool hardwood, and listen to the house’s silence. It always gave me space to think.

Now, I feared the sadness in my soul was sopping up the silence like a sponge. I felt heavier with each breath. It was no longer a soft silence, but a still one.

He lifted his head from the armrest. A muscle feathered in his jaw. “That bastard.”

I gave him a surprised look. “Come again?”

The vase stopped rattling almost instantly.

He folded his arms across his chest tightly, and harrumphed. “Minor inconvenience.”

His anger took me so off guard, so far out of my range of emotions about what happened to me, I dunno—I just lost it. I began to laugh. And cry. But mostly laugh as I slid off the chair and onto the ground beside him. It was one of those spiraling sorts of laughs, because I didn’t realize how I was supposed to feel about this story until just now—

I quickly turned my head away from him. Looked toward the foyer, and the colorful moonlight that slipped through the stained glass window.

I turned my head back toward him, the specter sitting so still in the parlor room where I had buried my hopes and dreams beneath the floorboards. “No,” I replied simply, and then I smiled. “You know, you being angry on my behalf is kinda sweet. I wish I’d met you sooner when you were alive.”

He returned the sad smile. “Me, too.”

24

Such a Scream

KEYS JINGLED IN the front door as Mom unlocked it and stepped in. I only took my eyes off Ben for a second as I scrambled to my feet, but when I turned back, he was gone. Disappeared again, though I didn’t know where he went. Mom jumped when she saw me standing in the parlor, and put a hand over her heart.

I shook my head. “Not at all.”

She handed me my food after I pulled on my coat. “Thanks. I haven’t been here for that long, have I? You guys just left.”

She shrugged. “It was weird without Xavier. We couldn’t stay.”

She was taller than I was, and thin like Alice. They both had dark hair, and when Alice was going through her rebel phase, she would steal dark lacy dresses from Mom’s closet and wear them to school like a real-life Lydia Deetz, though by then I was already in college and well away from Mairmont.

Mom locked the funeral home doors on the way out, and we stepped down into the brisk April night. There was still a chill tucked into the wind, but I could remember the way April warmed so suddenly to summer it was almost a shock. One week there were coats, the next shorts and flip-flops. Maybe tonight was the last cold one, maybe tomorrow, but either way time was passing, slowly ever on, leaving people behind like a flower losing its petals one by one.

I swallowed the knot in my throat. “Yeah.”

We passed the ice cream parlor where she and Dad went every weekend when I was little and she was pregnant with Alice. She always craved pistachio ice cream. If I closed my eyes, I could see Dad in the booth by the window with his sundae, feeding Carver with a small plastic spoon. “Here comes the Douglas DC-3 aircraft in for landing! Zzzzzzoom!”

But the parlor was different now, with a new coat of paint, a new owner, new ice cream flavors. However much Mairmont stayed the same, it kept shifting ever so slightly. Just enough for me to feel lost, for my past to feel like another lifetime ago.

And his ghost would probably still be badgering me about trying out for the debate team. He was adamant that I could argue my way out of trouble if I had to. And I proved him right my junior year of high school when Officer Saget caught me one too many times doing something slightly illegal for very good reasons.

Halfway back to the house, Mom said with a sigh of remorse, “Oh, what are we going to do when Carver and Nicki get married? It isn’t quite like I can dance with your father’s corpse.”

I nodded seriously. “You don’t have the upper arm strength.”

Gallows humor.

I missed it. I missed talking about death like another step in the journey. Lee Marlow hated my humor. He thought talking about death was gross and immature. And the guy before Lee—Sean—thought I was weird when I joked about death. William didn’t much care. And Quinn absolutely would not hear of it.

I missed my family.

I missed this. Mairmont’s quiet evenings, and the black dots that were palmetto bugs skittering across the sidewalk, and the moths fluttering around the streetlights, and the sound of the evenings buzzing with insects and the wind through the trees. I missed the certainty of Mom, and the defiance of Alice, and the middleness of Carver, and the steadfastness of Seaburn, and the slow bloom of Mairmont.

It seemed like New York was changing every time I blinked. One way one moment, and then completely different the next—a chameleon of a city that never fit into one box, that never clung to one descriptor. It was always something new, something exciting, something never before seen.

I loved that for a long time, the steady march to something impossible, the ability to reinvent itself again and again despite hurricanes and pandemics and elections. And I loved everyone who I met on those streets, the Williams and Seans and Lee Marlows . . .

But the sky was always dark, and only the brightest stars shone through the light pollution of the city that never slept.

Dad said that I’d miss the stars too much, and their permanence. In New York, it was hard to pick any out, but here in Mairmont, I could see them from horizon to horizon, and the spring thunderstorms that bubbled up on the southern edge of town.

The kind of thunderstorms Dad loved.

The ones that never made it into Lee Marlow’s book, and with a sudden realization I understood why I had felt so uncomfortable here. Coming home was one thing but—ever since I’d been home, I’d kept Mom and Carver and Alice at arm’s length. It wasn’t because I didn’t love them, or didn’t miss them.

I was ashamed, but talking with Ben helped me realize that I had no control over what Lee Marlow wrote. That it wasn’t my fault.

I couldn’t shoulder every burden, and especially not his.

She breathed out a sigh. “Thank god. I don’t think I could bury my husband and welcome a grandchild all at once. My range of emotions is not that flexible.”

I hesitated. “There’s more to it than that.”

And then I took a deep breath—and I told her. About Lee Marlow, and the stories I told him about our family. I told her about his book deal, and how I found out, and the last conversation we had before I found myself outside in the rain. It had been my choice to walk out. My choice to leave.

But really, what was the other option? Staying?

Mom crossed one leg over the other, and took out a pack of cigarettes from her back pocket. “Fuck him,” she quipped.

I . . . never thought of myself, my story, my life, as anything more than a boring book shelved in a boring library in a boring town. But the more I thought about my family, about the summers I and my siblings ran around in the sprinklers, and played hide-and-seek in the cemetery, and the Halloweens Mom dressed as Elvira and Dad hid in a coffin and popped out to scare every poor kid who came trick-or-treating, and the years Alice and I played dress-up with the vintage clothes we found in the attic, and the summers collecting animal bones, and lighting candles for midnight waltzes through the parlors, and sitting so quietly in the kitchen with Dad to listen to the wind sing—

There was nothing but love in those memories.

We might’ve been a family in black, but our lives were filled with light and hope and joy. And that was something that Lee Marlow never understood, never wrote in his cold, technical prose.

It was a kind of magic, a kind of love story, I didn’t think he’d ever understand.

From the oak tree in our yard, a crow cawed in the branches, and a few of his friends echoed. My chest tightened.

Ben.

Mom tapped me gently on the nose and smiled. “That’s how I know I’m a good mother. Now, these old bones need some rest,” she sighed, and stood. She kissed me on the forehead. In the porch light, she looked older than she ever had. Weighed down by sadness—but held together, still, by hope. “I’ll see you at the Waffle House in the morning. Sweet dreams, dearest.”

Then she went into the house, and closed the door behind her.

I sat there for a while longer as the wind began to howl through the trees as the storm grew closer. A flash of lightning streaked across the sky.

In my memories, I could see Dad sitting on the steps of the house, smoking a stinking cigar as he watched the storm roll in, a beer in one hand and a smile on his face, Mom leaning her head against his shoulder, a glass of merlot in her hand, her eyes closed as she listened to the rumble of thunder.

Another streak of lightning crawled across the sky, and I finally stepped out into the night.

The air was heavy and human. Alice said she couldn’t smell the rain, but I never understood how she couldn’t. It was so distinct, so full, so alive, like I wasn’t only breathing air, but the movement of electrons sparking together, igniting the sky.

As I started back toward the inn, thunder rolled across the town in a booming, house-shaking rattle that left my ears ringing. I hoped that when they eased Dad into the ground, the dirt would part for the thunder. I hoped the sound would rattle his bones still, make them dance, like they did mine. I hoped that, when the wind was high, blown from some far-off shore, I could hear him singing in the storm, as loud and high and alive as all the dead I’d ever heard singing.

I passed the inn and kept walking toward the town square. It was empty with the night and the coming storm. And then the rain came with a soft, low hum. First a droplet, then another, and then the air broke and the humidity rushed away to cool, sharp pinpricks of water. I tilted my head back, face toward the thunderous sky.

In Lee’s book, when it rained, Mairmont smelled like mud and pines, but standing in the middle of town, my flats flooding with water, the world smelled sharp from the oaks that lined the greens and the sweetness of the grass. He said that when it rained the town was quiet.

But my ears were full of noise.

I was soaked in a matter of moments. The rain passed right through Ben. He looked as dry as he had been before because he wasn’t real anymore. He was a ghost.

But he was here. Now. In the moment. Nevertheless.

He didn’t respond, so I guessed he never did.

My entire life was built on those kinds of things that I wasn’t supposed to do. I wasn’t supposed to move away, and I wasn’t supposed to ghostwrite for a romance author, and I wasn’t supposed to fail in turning the last book in, and I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with Lee Marlow, and I wasn’t supposed to come back here.

Not like this. Not for Dad’s funeral.

To that Ben replied, “Well, I’m dead and I have nothing to show for it. Nothing to exist after me. I was just here and now I’m . . . I’m gone.” He sounded frustrated and sad. “I had so many plans—so many. And now I will never be able to do any of them, and I just—I want—”

He looked at me in surprise. “Yeah. I do.”

He paused. “Do it?” he repeated. And suddenly—Ben screamed. Just a loud, vicious yell that echoed off the storefront windows and the town hall.

I stared at him, startled.

He said, “Like that?”

A smile curved my mouth. I didn’t think he’d actually do it, but . . . “Do you feel any better?”

And he screamed again. In his voice there was aggravation, and heartache, and sadness, because he was a ghost, and he had left his life behind, and he had died in the prime of it—and I hadn’t even thought about what he must’ve been feeling. To be dead. To be ignored. Invisible.

I was the only one who could hear him screaming.

But he didn’t do it for other people. He didn’t do it to be heard.

So I took a deep breath, and I screamed with him. I screamed into the howling storm, and my voice was carried off in the wind, it was struck down by thunder, it was dampened by the rain. I screamed again. And again.

And it did make both of us feel a little better.

25

Deadweight

BY THE TIME I made it back to the bed-and-breakfast, I looked like a drowned rat and my teeth were chattering, but I didn’t really care. I felt okay again—better than I had since I landed at the airport. Like a weight had been . . . not lifted, no, it was still there, but it had gotten a little lighter. Dad was gone, and I was grieving, and it was going to be okay.

It wasn’t yet—but it would be. I didn’t know you could feel like that. I didn’t know I could feel like that again—okay.

Not good, but better.

He asked, “You always take ghosts to scream in the rain?”

I tore my eyes away from his forearm. “No, I only take people I like.”

He barked a laugh. “Another talent of yours?”

He laughed again, and shifted on his feet. We stood awkwardly. My heart hammered in my throat, and I curled my fingers tightly into my palms because all I wanted to do was reach out, brush his floppy hair out of his face. He needed a haircut. Then again, I liked his hair when it wasn’t gelled to perfection. It curled at his ears and at the nape of his neck, the kind of curls I’d wrap around my fingers and toy with.

This felt like one of those moments when I should’ve said something. Anything. How much I appreciated his help, and how much I liked him near, and how sorry I was that he was dead—

We were on a boat passing under a bridge, for a second in the shadow, a moment—the moment—like the moment I felt with Lee in that private library, when I accepted his hand and let him pull me toward places unknown, like the moment with Stacey in the college bar in SoHo, when he asked my favorite ice cream flavor, and Quinn when he offered me a stick of gum in civics, and John in high school, inviting me out to pizza with his friends after prom. Small moments you catch, and keep in glass jars like fireflies, or you let go.

I couldn’t catch this moment; I couldn’t keep it—I couldn’t keep him. Better than anyone else, I knew what happened when I got too close to someone already dead, when I opened my heart and let someone in. It had happened before, and I found his murdered corpse on the Ridge three days later. A stupid, small part of me had thought he was still alive. But he wasn’t. He was a ghost.

Ben, too, was a ghost. Not alive.

Not real.

If I wasn’t careful, I’d make that mistake again.

And he knew it was a mistake, too, because we both let the moment pass, and found ourselves on the other side. He was meticulous. He thought things through. Of course he wouldn’t do anything, he wouldn’t say anything, he’d keep me at arm’s length for both of our sakes.

But then why was I so frustrated that he did?

He cleared his throat and nodded toward the door. “You should probably go inside before you catch your own death.”

Dana was sitting at the front desk, reading another book. An N. K. Jemisin fantasy this time. They looked up when they heard the bell above the door chime, and jumped off their stool. “You’re soaking wet!” they cried, grabbing a towel from underneath the desk, and coming around the side to hand it to me.

Everyone had that one person who made their high school career unbearable, and Heather was mine. We had been friends for a brief moment, until she came to the conclusion that I was crazy after the murder case. She never believed that I talked with ghosts—she thought I was looking for attention. She was also one of the main reasons why the rest of Mairmont thought so, too.

Out of the corner of my eye, Ben moved slowly into the lobby, his hands no longer in his pockets but on his hips. He stared in at the book club with pursed lips.

Dana, bless them, leaned forward on their stool and said loudly, “How’s your stay, Florence? Do you need anything? Towels, shampoo? Peace and quiet?” they added pointedly, darting their eyes at Heather.

She smoothed on a smile and poured herself a glass of lemon-infused water from the dispenser on the far side of the desk. “Well, I know when I’ve overstayed my welcome. It was nice to see you, Florence. Maybe we should catch up sometime,” she added, scrunching her nose with a grin, and clipped her way back into the living area, where book club resumed.

I sighed and leaned against the desk. “Damn. For two seconds I’d forgotten about her.”

They winced. “Yikes, sadly not.”

In the lounge, the book club tittered some more. I would be lying if I said I didn’t want to hear what they were saying about Midnight Matinee. Ben was leaning against the doorway, hands crossed over his chest, listening in on them. His face didn’t tell me anything, except that he was either bored with their analysis of my writing or he wasn’t paying attention to them at all.

I winced. “Yeah, I’ve thought about the Ridge.” Hadn’t been back there since that day. Of course wildflowers would be there, the one place I didn’t want to look. But it turned out, I might not have had the choice. “Thanks. I’ll hike up there tomorrow and see it.”

I grabbed one of the mints from the bowl and began to head up the stairs when my name caught my ears—a bare whisper, but there. From the living room. The women in the book club were talking about me now, and if who they had been in high school was any indication, it wasn’t anything good. My shoulders tensed.

Dana mouthed that I didn’t have to go, but I did. I’d spent ten years running from these assholes, and I was sick and damn tired of it.

Ben warned as I passed, “Don’t pick a fight.”

Oh, I wasn’t.

Heather quickly righted herself in the chair with an air of innocence. She’d been bent in toward some of the other women, whispering over their bookmarked novels. I wondered if they’d even read it, or if buying romance novels to never read and gossip over them was the newest trend. Heather looked like I remembered her, pretty brown hair and pretty brown eyes and a pretty smile over soft pink lips. She wore a sleek black skirt and a paisley-printed blouse. I remembered Dad once telling me that Karen had hired her as a clerk at her legal firm in town.

She smiled with strikingly white teeth. “Would you care to join us? We’re big fans of Ann Nichols.”

I bet she was.

I swallowed the rebuke bubbling up in my throat and sat down on the fainting couch beside her. “I love Midnight Matinee.”

I could feel Ben staring at the back of my head at that comment.

Heather asked me with a fixed smile, “What was that one book you wrote, Florence? We’d love to read it for our book club next month.”

I returned the smile, and it was a real one. “Seaburn said you already read it when it came out.”

I was sure she hadn’t. I took a deep breath. Wrestled my emotions under control. I was an adult, and I wasn’t running anymore. “I know you don’t like me, Heather, and I know it was you who spread those rumors about me in high school—that I was crazy or a devil worshipper or whatever.”

She went rigid and darted her gaze around the rest of the book club. A few of them went to high school with us. They knew. The others had a passing, vague recollection of what happened. It was a small town, after all. “It was hardly just me. It was Bradley and TJ and—”

She blinked. “Excuse me?”

She narrowed her eyes. Did she remember? Probably not. She probably hadn’t thought about the boy murdered on the Ridge in fifteen years.

Dana gave me a weathered salute as I climbed the stairs and mouthed, “Holy shit.”

Holy shit indeed. I didn’t let myself pause until I was almost at the top of the stairs. My hands were shaking.

I let out a solid breath and dug around in my satchel for my room key.

Ben came up the stairs behind me. “Harry? He’s the boy you helped?”

He said, a bit sadly, “You liked him.”

He reached out, but then stopped himself and crossed his arms over his chest. His biceps strained his tailored shirt, not that I was looking. Because I wasn’t. Because he was so very off-limits.

The lock clicked and I shouldered the door open. “And anyway, thank you for tonight.”

A thought occurred to me as he made his way back down the hall. “Where do you go?” The question surprised him because he turned back around on his heels toward me. “I mean—ghosts don’t sleep, so . . .”

He shrugged. “I wander. Until I disappear, then I usually just come back somewhere near you.”

He shook his head.

Sit in my room, but that sounded weird. It was weird. For all I knew I was inviting him to stare at me while I slept á la Edward Cullen. He said he was a romantic, so it was really a coin toss on whether he’d be flattered to role-play Twilight or aghast that I’d remotely consider it. I shook my head and said, “Never mind. Have a good night, Ben.”

I closed the door and pressed my back against it, because I felt my heart beating—so fast it felt like it wanted to jump right out of my chest. He had been so close to me, so close I noticed the thin scar under his right eyebrow, and the beauty mark above his lip, and the fine black hairs on his arms and—

And not just because I was falling for—

I wasn’t falling.

I couldn’t.

I tried not to entertain the idea as I pulled up Dad’s obituary again, and stared at the blank document.

Then I took a deep breath, and remembering what my Mom told me earlier, I started with a simple story.

I started with goodbye.