‘I don’t need to go to a support group,’ said the girl who’d watched a video of a man being squashed by a train ten times in a row that morning.

Mom winced – at what, I wasn’t sure – and tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear. ‘It’ll be good for you.’

‘Mom, I don’t want to go. Please.’

She just looked at me, and for a horrible second we were frozen there, but then she rose, plodded away, and shut the office door softly behind her.

Everything was wrong.

I wasn’t going to a fucking support group.

If there was anything I was certain wasn’t going to help me, it was singing Kum ba yah with a bunch of strangers in some sad therapy office, drawing pictures or doing breathing exercises or talking about feelings. How patronizing.

It occurred to me that I was surrounded by a therapist’s entire collection of books – at least one of them had to be on grief and, if I read it through, I realized I’d probably be able to convince Mom I’d been miraculously cured or something.

I dragged a finger along the bookshelf and stopped at a book called Grief Counselling and Grief Therapy: Fourth Edition. Bingo. No secret passageway opened when I plucked it out, disappointingly. I took the book to the couch and opened it to the table of contents; a section titled ‘Chronic Grief Reactions’ caught my eye.

It is not unusual for patients to only seek help two to five years later, saying that the death still feels unresolved and that they haven’t returned to their normal lives.

My stomach dropped.

I was going to feel like this for another two to five years?

Anniversary reactions are common for ten years or longer.

I wanted to rip out my hair.

I got the hell out of that chapter and flicked idly through the rest of the book until I got caught on a dog-eared page with a passage highlighted in yellow.

The functioning level of the surviving parent was the most powerful predictor of a child’s adjustment to the death of a parent.

The rest of the section was about how parents should best behave to ensure their kids don’t fall off the deep end, basically. It was all highlighted; at first, I thought by Dad, but as I read, I realized they were all things that Mom had been attempting to do.

I tried to swallow the guilt, but it wouldn’t budge.

And then came the knocks. Three of them, on the window.

I turned to look. June Copeland grinned through the glass.

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

She waved, beaming, like she wasn’t trespassing.