1

The casket lids remained closed for the funeral.

Margot had seen beneath them. Just once, that morning, four hours before the guests were expected to arrive. The mortuary owner had led her into a cool, dusty viewing room behind the funeral home, where two heavy caskets had been positioned below the sole window.

Margot blinked furiously. Her eyes were dry, but her throat felt rough, as though she’d tried to swallow gravel. She fixed her gaze on her clenched hands as she willed her stuttering heart to calm. There had been no question of whether her parents’ funeral could include a viewing.

Around her, old pews creaked. A lot of people had shown up. More than she’d anticipated. She’d found a seat about halfway back in the dim, cold church and sat surrounded by an ocean of black-wrapped strangers.

Ahead, past the rows of gently shifting heads, the two caskets had been positioned on the raised platform. A pastor with a soft, well-creased face stood behind the lectern and read from loose pages of handwritten script. He talked about how the Lord was taking his children home. How they would be missed by all, how we might not understand why loved ones had been taken so suddenly but that it was not for us to know.

He wasn’t telling her any of the things that really mattered. The last time Margot had seen her parents, she’d been eight, and she remembered none of it. She was desperate for the gentle-voiced pastor to tell her about her only family. Whether they laughed often. Whether they’d had tempers. How often they visited their friends.

Even what they’d looked like.

What they looked like before death at least.

There were no photos on the caskets, just wreaths filled with carnations and roses and hydrangeas, ghastly bright in the dim room, held in beds of ferns and placed on the sealed lids as though necessary to distract from what was beneath.

Under the stream of gentle platitudes, Margot was left grasping for any hint of what kind of people her parents might have been.

A lot of guests had shown up. They were liked in town, then. Or at least, they were entrenched enough that acquaintances felt obligated to attend.

The caskets—bought as part of a funeral plan years before—were solid and carefully crafted, but their design was simple. They looked expensive but not gaudy.

The pastor paused and looked up from his notes. There was something in his eyes. Margot frowned as she tried to read the expression. Some kind of…distress? The pupils, hidden behind thin-rimmed glasses, were more constricted than the dull light should have caused. They seemed to flicker, staring into the audience without actually seeing, as though some unpleasant idea gnawed through his mind, drawing his focus.

Did he see what they looked like too?