Eli’s mother was sitting at the kitchen table with crumpled tissues scattered in front of her. His sister was in the chair beside her, in her unicorn pajamas, looking more scared than upset.

“What’s going on?” Eli asked as Cora walked over, her head hung low, to say hi. Eli bent to pet her; you could tell she knew something was wrong.

“Your grandfather …” His mother trailed off into tears.

“He died,” his sister said, and something about her being the one to say it made it worse.

“How do you know?” Eli asked, wanting to reach into his bag for the device, wanting to ask it if it had done this, not quite understanding that it was actually gone.

Looking confused by the question, his mother said, “I got a call.”

“You spoke to an actual person?” Eli said, his heart starting to quicken.

“Yes, I spoke to a person. How else would I have found out?”

Eli turned around and walked back out of the apartment—“Where are you going?” trailed after him—and down the stairs and down past the house that always smelled of pot and the one that always smelled of curry and then the Walgreens and massage parlor and nail salon and 99-cent store and falafel place and bodega and the dry cleaner and bagel store and the new grocery store, if it would ever open.

The whole thing with Svetlana had been a trick; that meant that this could be, too.

He passed the tutoring center and the deli with the massive sub that was free if you could eat the whole thing and the Korean bubble tea place and the real estate agency with photos of nicer apartments than Eli’s in the windows.

Inside the nursing home—finally—a nurse he knew well enough, Janine, spotted him in the lobby, where the air smelled of his grandfather’s favorite meal—Salisbury steak, which Eli was pretty sure was served only in nursing homes.

“Oh, Eli,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

“I need to see him,” he said.

“He’s gone, Eli,” she said.

“I still need to see him,” he said.

“No, I mean the funeral home already came and took him,” she said.

“What funeral home?”

“Your mother said to call Clancy’s.”

He supposed he could go there, though it would be hard to explain. People didn’t typically storm into funeral homes after hours, demanding to see the dead. Or maybe they did. “Was it the pacemaker again?” he asked.

A movie was playing in the common room to the right. A handful of bodies hunched in wheelchairs silhouetted in front of the screen.

“No,” the nurse said. “He just fell asleep and didn’t wake up.”

“But it was because of the thing with the pacemaker earlier?”