I try to veer around her, but she fills the doorway. “Clay…”

“Please!” I plead, pushing past her. “I need to be here.”

“Clay, it’s a child,” she rushes out as I pass.

I stop, staring at the floor but not seeing it.

Children don’t come through often, but when they do, she makes sure I’m not present. Maybe it’s because of Henry. Maybe it’s because she knew my parents weren’t aware that I come here, and the death of a child, even ones I don’t know, will be hard.

I don’t turn around to look at her, merely raising my gaze to the steel double doors ahead. It feels like my heart is floating in my chest as my stomach roils.

I keep walking, hearing her rush after me. “Clay, please.”

But I ignore her. Pushing through the doors, I enter the room and see the boy, a small body outlined under a sheet.

He’s uncovered down to his stomach, and something spills down the drain, but I don’t look to see what.

I walk over.

“Clay…”

I know she’s worried, but I don’t know… Maybe I’m just too numb tonight to be scared anymore. I need to do this.

Approaching the boy’s side, I see his wet, brown hair slicked back, his jaw slack, and his eyes partially open, the brown pupils foggy.

She’d just washed him. Water still runs down the drain underneath the table, and his palms face up at his sides. There’s dirt under his nails and scratches on his forearm, probably from playing with his cat or dog.

A lump grows in my throat, always finding this part hardest of all. The evidence of their lives. Bruises, skinned knees, old scars, chipped nail polish…

A tear spills over as I look down at his skinny arms. “He’s, um…”

“Like Henry,” she says, seeing what I see. The coloring is different, but they’re about the same age. Ten or eleven.

“What happened to him?” I ask her, still letting my eyes roam for any evidence of violence.

“He drowned,” she replies. “He was swimming at the Murtaugh Inlet. Got swept into the current.”

It isn’t unheard of. We swim a lot in Florida. Drownings happen.

The hard part is that it’s not a quick death. He would’ve been aware with every second that passed that help wasn’t coming.

Like Henry.

“His brother was making out with his girlfriend in his car and didn’t notice for ten minutes,” she whispers, her throat thick.

I almost feel sorry for him, too. A mistake that will haunt him forever.

And I’m here. Alive. Healthy. Continuously making problems worse, because I act like I don’t have a clue.

I smooth back his hair, everything at home forgotten for the moment, because somewhere out there in town is a devastated family who will never see their son smile again.

I draw in a deep breath and swallow the tears that want to come as I raise my eyes to Mrs. Gates. “Embalming?”

“Yes,” she tells me. “There will be a viewing on Thursday followed by cremation.”

I nod and pull the rubber band off my wrist, sweeping my hair up into a ponytail. “I’ll take the lead.”

We work for the next two hours, not talking other than her instruction here and there. I can’t look him in the face when the needles go in, feeling the bile rise, because it’s hard not to see Henry on the table. We prepare him to stay preserved until the funeral, and I’ll come back in a couple of days to take care of the cosmetics and dress him, but the embalming process takes longer with me here now, because it’s like the first time I’m doing it all over again. What mattered most to me with Henry was that Mrs. Gates was gentle with my brother. I take extra care with this one.

“Did I ever tell you that I lived in New York for a time?” Mrs. Gates says across the table.

I meet her eyes as we work.

“I loved it.” She smiles a little. “Too cold, but it was a lot of fun. That’s where I studied to become a funeral director.”

I think I knew that, but I can’t be sure.

She shuts off the machine. “It’s one of the best schools in the country for mortuary science.”

Mortuary science?

“I can get you in,” she says. “If you want to go.”

I stop, locking eyes with her. My first instinct is to laugh or scoff. I can’t tell people I’m an undertaker. It’s not romantic like an actor or an artist, or heroic like a lawyer or a doctor.

But then, most people haven’t seen what I’ve seen here, either. Mrs. Gates is there during one of the most important times in a person’s life.

“You have a strong stomach,” she tells me. “You empathize. You care. I think the best people to help us say goodbye are the ones who’ve had to do it themselves.”

I keep working, listening.

“You know what these families need.” She drops tools to the tray, picking up another one. “Funerals aren’t for the dead, after all.”

They’re for the survivors.

The idea is ridiculous. Everyone will laugh.

My grandmother would have a cow.

But then, I look down at the kid, Mitchell Higgins from the name on his file, and know that tomorrow I could be him.

If not tomorrow, next week. Next year. Five years from now, because no matter when, it is coming.

“I know your parents want you to go to Wake Forest,” she says, “but if you decide your life should go a different path, I’ll sponsor you.”

Sponsor me?

“You work here on vacations and give me two years after you’ve gotten your degree,” she tells me, “I’ll pay your tuition.”

NEW YORK. WHY does the idea of being that close to Liv make me so happy? I can’t follow her. I gave her up, and being that close will only make it impossible to move on.

And worse. Being that close and knowing she’s moving on will be unbearable.

I can’t go to New York. Wake Forest is perfect, actually. It’s halfway between home and her, not an easy distance to either. I need to let her be. Just like she asked me to weeks ago.

I walk up my driveway, seeing lights glowing from inside my house, and I know I’ll find my mom sitting at the table, waiting for me.

Not so much because she’s worried, which any other parent might be since I left my phone in my room hours ago and she couldn’t get a hold of me, but because it would look bad to go to sleep with an angry, teenage daughter out this late.

I step inside the house, the clock chiming one in the morning as I lock the door behind me.

But as I would normally stomp up the stairs and try to hide in my room to avoid her, I find myself listening for her.

I hear nothing.

I drift from room to room, looking for her, a lot calmer than I was hours ago.

They weren’t always like this. I keep forgetting that. When my brother was alive, we were pretty happy, actually. My parents are disappointing, but when I remember the parents Henry knew, I miss them.

A painting has been ripped off the wall and lays on the marble floor face-down, a vase with roses shattered next to it amidst a puddle of the water that was inside.

I head up the stairs, seeing their wedding pictures broken on the floor of the hallway, as well as the destruction I wreaked before I ran out. I find my mother in her closet, gowns, shoes, and blouses strewn everywhere as she leans back against the dresser in the center of the room, holding a large bottle of Evian between her bent legs.