To be perfectly honest, I don’t know if I believe in souls. Frankly, I don’t know if I believe in much, but what I do believe is this: We are more than flesh and bone. There is something undefined, something unknowable, that makes us who we are. Something that makes us people. It is the thing that makes us smile, makes us laugh, makes us cry, and makes us grieve. It was what makes us love and hate. It makes us human. And whatever that was for Alejandro is no longer there. I don’t know where it’s gone. I just know that it’s not here.

What lies on that table is just a body. Nothing more.

My hand trembles the tiniest bit as I pick up the heavy brass candleholder. The light flickers, casting dancing shadows against the bare brick walls.

I force one foot in front of the other until I draw up beside the table. A white blanket covers his nude form, as if the dead have any dignity to be spared. His eyes are glossy and open. Unseeing. My hand twitches toward his face to close them, but I know better. They won’t stay closed without the muscle cooperating. That’s not how dead bodies work, no matter how many plays and novels try to convince us otherwise.

My hands curl into fists at my sides. The desire to touch him wars with the part of me that knows I’ll regret it if I do. He won’t be warm. He’ll be cold and weirdly soft. He won’t be what I remember him to be at all.

It takes every inch of my will to guide my eyes away from his.

I came here to find something. Anything. A single clue that would tell me where to start looking for the truth of what happened to him.

Alejandro did not kill himself. This, I know. He was murdered. It’s the only thing that makes sense, if a senseless, cruel, violent death can be forced to make any sense at all.

But my brain refuses to be clever when confronted with the awful truth of his dead body lying on a wooden slab like so much meat.

“Come on,” I say out loud to no one but myself. “There has to be something.”

The last thing I want is to reach out and pull the blanket back. It’s not that his nude form is a mystery to me. I’d seen him naked before, in the lake by the Sonza estate, with its crisp, cool waters. He wasn’t ashamed, and I grew up in a brothel. Neither one of us were overly bothered by it. But that was when he was alive. Now, he’s not. But I do what I must.