He’d already told me Izzy was dead, too, and I was working hard to wrap my mind around it. How two twelve-year-old girls could be alive and laughing this morning and not breathing a few hours later. It was a cliché that they’d had their whole lives ahead of them, but it had also been the truth. I didn’t understand how my daughter, whose presence lit up a room, whose life made mine bearable, could be dead. Shouldn’t the world have stopped spinning the moment she left it?

Cal pulled up right in front of the funeral home, in the space usually reserved for the hearse. The entrance was flanked with faux pillars in an attempt to give the place a distinguished air and distract from the fact it was a crappy cinder block building set on a cracked asphalt lot. Not the kind of place anyone would choose to say their final good-byes. Cal turned off the engine, the early evening suddenly bathed in quiet. When he turned to look at me, his face was pale and grim. “Can you do this?” he asked. “Because you don’t have to. Not right now.”

But I was already pushing out of the passenger side. “I can do it,” I said over my shoulder. Truth was, I didn’t know if I could. But moving forward felt like my only option. Sitting still would kill me, would give reality a chance to settle down beside me and sink its teeth in, all the way to the bone. I didn’t want to contemplate, even for a second, my life without Junie in it. How empty it would be from now on. How pointless.

There was another deputy waiting for us just inside the door, hat held in front of his beer-habit belly. John Miller, who I’d known my whole life, who’d let me sit in the back of his squad car to keep warm when the cops had showed up to search my mama’s trailer for meth. Once a year like clockwork and always drove away empty-handed. My mama may have been ignorant, but she was never, ever stupid. But today Deputy Miller acted like he’d never seen me before, said “Sure am sorry” in a low voice, and kept his gaze somewhere to the left of my shoulder. It didn’t bother me any, even though I could feel Cal stiffening up next to me. I didn’t want to look into Miller’s eyes, either, to see the pity and horror there. Wanted to keep pretending this was a particularly lucid nightmare I’d wake up and tell Junie about, snuggled with her on her narrow bed. I’d hug her too tight and she’d squirm away, telling me not to worry.

“Sheriff’s waiting for you on back in the bereavement room,” Miller said, clapped one hand on Cal’s shoulder as we walked past. I stumbled a little, small enough that no one else would have noticed, but Cal put out a hand, gripped me around the elbow. “It’s okay,” he murmured. “We’re all on the same team now.”