Chapter 1

At 7:16 on Friday, October 24, my mother-in-law put both hands on my shoulders and shoved me into the casket-display table.

I had been in the arrangement room because Deborah asked me to bring her the moving company’s confirmation. The voicemail had come in at 7:12. Denver. December first. A two-bedroom near Caleb’s new funeral home, with a dishwasher and a second bathroom and a lease I had already signed in my head. I had played it twice in the office, stupid with hope, and Deborah had been standing behind me with the account ledger open in her hands.

She waited until I was inside the arrangement room, until I had set my phone on the edge of the walnut table, before she said, “You think you can take my son.”

“Caleb took the job,” I said. “I didn’t make him.”

“You made him believe he wanted it.”

She was still in her black wool dress from the visitation. Jet brooch at her collar. Howard’s watch loose on her wrist. She looked like a widow in a painting, and then she stepped forward, quick for sixty-two, and shoved me.

The table caught my left hip. The corner drove in hard enough that my vision went white. I went down on the rug with my arm folded under my belly, and the table went over with a sound that would stay in my ears for weeks, brass lamp crashing behind it, sample casket corners tipping on the shelf.

Blood started warm under my dress. I could feel it spreading, tacky against the gray maternity fabric, and I kept my hand pressed to the place where the pain was worst, as if I could hold the baby in by will alone.

Deborah did not call for help.

She stood over me. Her gray eyes were flat, fixed, not panicked. She looked at the blood, then at my face, then at the doorway.

“Don’t move,” she said.

I couldn’t have moved. My hip was on fire. My belly had gone hard as a fist. I tried to say her name, but my mouth was dry, and she was already at the door, not running, not yelling, just stepping out into the corridor in her low black heels.

She came back with Rae.

Rae was in her black funeral-home slacks and white shirt, florist’s apron still tied at her waist. She saw me on the rug and made a sound like she had been hit. She dropped to her knees. Deborah caught her wrist before she could touch me.

“Put your hands on her,” Deborah said.

Rae shook her head. “Momma-”

“Put your hands on her.” Deborah pressed a folded white altar cloth into Rae’s palms and guided her hands down to my hip. “Say it exactly like I told you.”

The cloth bloomed red.

Rae’s hands shook so hard the linen jumped. “She fell,” she whispered.

Deborah’s fingers tightened around her daughter’s wrist. “Louder.”

“She fell,” Rae said. “I was just trying to help her.”

The sentence went through me like ice water. I had heard it in Deborah’s voice two minutes earlier, while I lay on the rug and my mother-in-law was deciding what this was going to look like.

Then the door banged open.

Caleb filled the doorway. He was still in his black suit from the visitation, visitor badge swinging from his jacket, grief sitting on him like a coat he couldn’t take off. He saw me first. I know he did. His face broke open, all that fear and love aimed at me for one clean second.

Then he saw Rae.

“What did you do to her?”

Rae lifted both hands off the cloth. They were red to the wrists. “She fell. I was just trying to help her.”

Caleb crossed the room in three strides. I tried to say No, but the word was too small. His arm swung. His hand cracked across Rae’s face, and she reels back into the stack of metal folding chairs, shoulder first, then hip. The chairs clattered down around her. She stayed there on the floor, one hand to her cheek, not looking at him.

She looked past him into the corridor.

Her whole face emptied. Not fear. Not pain. Something worse. A kind of terrible relief, as if she had finally seen the thing she had been waiting for.

Then her eyes climbed up the wall, past the doorframe, to the ceiling corner above the door.

The camera was still running.

Small white dome. Red indicator light pulsing steady. I had installed it fourteen months ago for out-of-town families who couldn’t stand in the arrangement room to pick out a casket. Deborah had insisted on administering the account. The live monitor sat in her office. It was as ordinary as the carpet.

Rae’s face went white as the altar cloth.

Deborah appeared in the doorway then, one hand on the frame, composing herself for the room. “Caleb,” she said, voice calm enough to stop a train. “Son. Look at me.”

Paramedics came. Somebody must have called them. Deborah told a deacon in the front parlor that Rae had lost her temper and Laney had fallen. I heard her through the hush, through the flowers and the carpet cleaner and the low organ music from the viewing parlor.

When they lifted me onto the stretcher, Rae was still on the rug. I caught her wrist. My hand left a red print on her white cuff.

“Don’t let her touch me,” I said, loud enough for the paramedics, loud enough for Deborah.

Deborah’s eyes met mine. For one second, the widow’s mask slipped. She knew I remembered.

They airlifted me to Atlanta at 8:40. I lay under the rotor noise with my hands over my belly and the red light from that camera pulsing behind my eyes.