Growing up with four siblings, it had been drilled into her at an early age: you did what served the greatest number. There was never going to be enough money for each of them to get the DVD they wanted, so they got the one they could all compromise on. They couldn’t buy each of them a new sweater of their choosing because they all had different favorite colors, so they got one that wasn’t overtly hated by any of them.

What that had resulted in her whole childhood was everyone watching movies they didn’t hate but didn’t love. Everyone wearing a sweater that was the slightly wrong size and a color they didn’t like. Not a big deal when you were talking about a movie or a sweater.

But when you were talking about choices that affected your whole life, didn’t compromise result in everyone getting something that no one really wanted?

What kind of life is that?

A wasted one.

“Okay,” Carys said. “This is one of my favorite spots.”

They stood in front of a cemetery with high stone walls and an iron gate thrown open to the sidewalk lined with live oaks.

There was a small cemetery on Owl Island, but it didn’t look anything like this. It was crooked and sea-blasted, stones worn almost blank by salt and time. This was laid out like a small city, with sidewalks in rows and crypts that stood above the ground. Each was grand and some even had wrought-iron fencing around them like a house. The wall they entered through looked like safety-deposit boxes. Carys explained that they held remains.

“The aboveground tombs are expensive, so this is a cheaper option. Also, the tombs can’t be opened for a year after a body is interred. So if it’s a family tomb and someone else in the family dies, say, eight months later, they can’t reopen their family crypt, so lots of families have a secondary spot in the wall to put a body in until the crypt can be opened again and the body permanently interred.”

“Why can’t they be opened?” Greta asked, visions of ghosts and vampires swimming deliciously in her head.

“I think it was probably a health thing to prevent diseases back in the day? A lot of people here died from yellow fever.”

“Oh,” Greta said, slightly disappointed it wasn’t more supernatural. “That makes sense.”

“I see. You wanted some spooky shit, huh?”

Greta grinned. “Kinda.”

Carys took her hand and they walked through the narrow pathways, weaving between tombs and around gravestones until they came to a tomb near another gated entrance to the cemetery.