She ran straight into my chest so hard I nearly fell backward.
I held my daughter as tightly as I could.
She was trembling.
Her hair hadn’t been brushed properly.
She was wearing the same purple cardigan Clara usually reserved for school.
I pulled back just enough to look at her face.
“Where’s Mommy?” I whispered, even though I already knew the answer.
Lily immediately began crying.
Behind her, my mother said, “Don’t ask her too many questions right now. She’s confused.”
But I couldn’t stop looking at my little girl.
Something about her expression told me there was more she wanted to say.
Inside the living room, Clara’s coffin rested beneath the chandelier.
White lilies surrounded it.
I stopped breathing.
My wife was lying only ten feet away from me.
I tried to move toward her.
Then my aunt Beatrice stepped in front of me.
She owned the town’s only funeral home and had handled almost every family funeral since I was a teenager.
Usually, Beatrice was calm.
Practical.
Almost impossible to unsettle.
But now she looked nervous.
“We need to leave for the cemetery soon,” she said.
I stared at her.
“What?”
“The service was scheduled for seven.”
“I just got home.”
“I know, but—”
“My wife has been dead for almost three days, nobody told me, and you’re worried about being late?”
Her lips tightened.
“We shouldn’t delay burial unnecessarily.”
“Why?”
“No reason.”
“Then postpone it.”
My mother’s head snapped toward me.
“Alex—”
“No.”
I walked farther into the room.
Then I saw my father.
Arthur sat beside the staircase in his wheelchair.
Two years earlier, he’d suffered a serious stroke. It had left him dependent on the chair and made speaking difficult.
But his mind was completely intact.
He understood everything.
And my father had always been observant.
Sometimes painfully so.
The moment our eyes met, he struck the armrest of his wheelchair three times.
Bang.
Bang.
Bang.
Then he pointed upstairs.
