Heather looked as if she was about to start screaming again, but I headed her off at the pass. I said, smoothly and evenly, ‘Now, I know you made a mistake. You made a horrible, terrible mistake—’

‘I’m not the one who made the mistake,’ Heather said, flatly. ‘Bryce made the mistake. Bryce is the one who broke up with me.’

I said, ‘Yeah, well, that wasn’t the mistake I was talking about. I was talking about you shooting yourself because a stupid boy broke up with—’

‘If you think he’s so stupid,’ Heather said with a sneer, ‘why are you going out with him on Saturday? That’s right. I heard him ask you out. The rat. He probably wasn’t faithful a day the whole time we were going out.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Well, that’s just great. All the more reason for you to kill yourself over him.’

There were tears, sparkling like those rhinestones you buy and glue to your fingernails, gathered beneath her lashes. ‘I loved him,’ she breathed. ‘If I couldn’t have him, I didn’t want to live.’

‘And now that you’re dead,’ I said, tiredly, ‘you figure he ought to join you, right?’

‘I don’t like it here,’ she said, softly. ‘No one can see me. Just you and F-Father Dominic. I get so lonely . . .’

‘Right. That’s understandable. But Heather, even if you do manage to kill him, he probably isn’t going to like you for it much.’

‘I can make him like me,’ Heather said confidently. ‘After all, it’ll just be me and him. He’ll have to like me.’

I shook my head. ‘No, Heather. It doesn’t work that way.’

She stared at me. ‘What do you mean?’

‘If you kill Bryce, there’s no guarantee he’ll end up here with you. What happens to people after they die – well, I’m not sure, but I think it’s different for everyone. If you kill Bryce, he’ll go to wherever it is he’s supposed to go. Heaven, hell, his next life – I don’t know for sure. But I do know he won’t end up here with you. It doesn’t work that way.’

‘But—’ Heather looked furious. ‘But that isn’t fair!’

‘Lots of things aren’t fair, Heather. It isn’t fair, for example, that you have to suffer for all eternity for a mistake that you made in the heat of a moment. I’m sure if you’d known what it was like to be dead, you never would have killed yourself. But, Heather, it doesn’t have to be this way.’

She stared down at me. The tears were frozen there, like little tiny shards of ice. ‘It doesn’t?’

‘No. It doesn’t.’

‘You mean . . . you mean I can go back?’

I nodded. ‘You can. You can start over.’

She sniffled. ‘How?’

I said, ‘All you have to do is make up your mind to do it.’

A scowl passed over her pretty face. ‘But I already made up my mind that that’s what I want. All I’ve wanted since it . . . since it happened . . . was to get my life back.’