Chapter Ten Him
Seventeen years ago …
One thing this world can always rely on is death.
It never stops. It doesn’t show mercy by slowing or taking a break, even for a day. If anything, mercy is there only when death comes faster.
But it was that truth, that reliable constant, that meant he could at least get into the building. He wouldn’t be able to go into the room. Not with the others who would see his face and question it. But he couldn’t stay away. The second he saw the announcement, he knew he had to find a way to be there, to be close to her one last time. Reading her obituary took what little was left of his soul and scattered it. She was gone. There was no question about that. There hadn’t been since the night she died, and he stood, overlooked in the shadows, and watched them load what should have been his life into the back of the ambulance.
Yet reading the obituary made that pain more intense, more real. That night it had been just the private pain of the two people who loved Mariya most: Emma and Ian. And him, too. He shared in their pain, though they didn’t know it. Keeping it close, holding it only for themselves, made it more bearable. If they were the only ones who knew, then she still existed. She still breathed in the minds and thoughts of everyone who didn’t know yet, like a flame kept lit from a candle long after its source has gone out. That kept her real. That kept her alive.
But even that flame smoldered. Knowledge spread. It became official. It spread out, claiming every memory of her it touched. Those final breathing moments of her ran, pushing into the farthest recesses of people’s minds, but the obituary ended that. It killed those fleeting moments. Her death was not final until the world knew. She was gone now. He could still think of her, but he could no longer pretend she would ever return.
He needed that one last chance to be close to her. He needed one more time to be in the same space as her, even if it was only her body. Seeing the announcement proved to him, no one knew what had really happened. It was reassuring, in a way. Not because it meant he was safe. He didn’t care about that. It meant he could continue his mission. More importantly, he could ensure justice. Mariya deserved that. She deserved more than a court would ever give her.
He went to the funeral home long before her service was set to begin. Disappearing into the milling mourners going into other rooms, he walked into the building without being noticed. Death was one thing he could rely on. It was not just her there. There were more, who became nothing but memories on the same night she did. The place filled with people who wanted those last fleeting moments with them. They wouldn’t notice him joining them.
Grief rarely produces questions. No one wants to pry into why you are paying your last respects. When a stranger appears at a wedding, everyone wants to connect the dots, to create those connections that stitch together the tapestry of a new life for the couple. At a funeral, no one wants a closer glimpse of that tapestry unraveling.
It was his intention to only linger at the back of the room where he could be hidden by the mourners and still glance out to see the door to the room where her coffin lay. But something drew him to the front. He couldn’t resist the magnetic pull that brought him down through the rows of chairs and to the side of the casket. It was open. For the first time, he looked at the face of the man being grieved. There was nothing about him that was extraordinary. Nothing that made him stand out against anyone else. Yet the room continued to fill with tearful eyes and trembling hands. Layers of black fabric crushed against each other in tight hugs, exchanged for no other reason than they still had life in them to give them.
He was suddenly curious about the man, wondering who he was and what he meant to each of the people coming into the room. But he also wanted to know his secrets. Everyone has them. No one who is born into this world and lives beyond childhood leaves it without something buried deep inside them. What were this man’s? What did he hide from these people? And how many of them were now hiding them from each other?
He stood at the edge of the casket and stared into the man’s face, wondering what his eyes looked like when he was alive. How his voice sounded. It was hard to imagine either one. He almost didn’t look real, like this was all in place just to make use of the room. It wasn’t like the other times he’d seen bodies without souls. This wasn’t new to him. But there was something strange about looking at someone prepared so carefully after death. It was ritualized; designed for the living, not for the departed. He knew the process of separating life from its vessel. He’d watched the moment when all the light of life pulls away from flesh and bone to turn to dust again. It was familiar to him. More familiar than life emerging into the world.
But he wasn’t as familiar with what happened in the days following that transition. When the body was taken into the responsibility of someone who held claim to it, someone who loved what once dwelled inside. It was strange to see the careful, delicate way the body was treated. The way it was painted and powdered until it barely resembled the person, and then filled with chemicals in a desperate bid to cling for just a little longer.
It was futile. No chemicals, no metal-lined casket, no
