I pulled the blanket back and kissed her temple. Like she used to kiss mine. It was excruciatingly bittersweet. A tender action gutted me.
When I left, something inside me shut off. Like a switch. Like a fuse burning out. No more warmth. No more sound. No more color.
Just a hallway. White. Endless.
And me.
Alone.
CHAPTER 1
ELLIOT
“Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.”
The pastor’s voice fluttered against the breeze like tissue paper—too soft, too hollow—to carry what it was meant to. The words didn’t land with the weight she deserved. The wind refused to hold them, refused to carry them to the gathered crowd that had converged on the small cemetery like it wanted no part in this.
Neither did I.
The sun shouldn’t have been shining. It shouldn’t have dared. Not when my mom was dead. Yet the world bloomed in color all around me—too bright, too alive. It made me sick to my stomach. The grass looked greener than I remembered. The sky stretched into a cloudless blue, as if it hadn’t received the memo: today was a day for broken things.
The world kept moving, pulsing with life, while mine had drained to hollow shades of gray. It had been three weeks since everything changed.
Three weeks since the bank robbery that claimed her, a gun that wasn’t meant to fire, a moment of violence that turned my life into before and after.
They said it took time. To collate all the evidence. All that time mom’s body had been held in a sterile room under fluorescent lights while angles and reports were logged and signed off. While forms were passed from desk to desk. Dad handled it on auto pilot. He signed where they told him to sign. I watched him age years in a matter of days.
By the time they finally released her, the shock was already gone. There was nothing left to burn through—just a dull, constant ache that settled behind my ribs and refused to move.
Time stretched and collapsed in on itself. Hours that dragged. Days that disappeared. My phone, once ringing constantly, had gone quiet. The messages slowed. Then stopped.
I shut everyone out.
Not because I didn’t care—but because I didn’t have the language for this. No words big enough. No way to explain this kind of emptiness to people who had never felt it.
I stood at the graveside, hands numb at my sides, watching them bury what was left of my mom into the ground. Three weeks late. Still impossibly too soon.
The casket creaked as it was lowered into the ground, the thick ropes groaning under its weight. That dull, finalthudwhen it hit the bottom, wasn’t closure. It didn’t bring peace. It was a question mark, a what-the-fuck-now?
I didn’t cry, even though it was what everyone expected. Not since they switched off the machines and the room fell so silent it felt like the air was sucked out, leaving behind a vacuum of grief. Not even when the nurse gently touched my shoulder like I was breakable and said, “I’m sorry.” Not when Dad signed the forms releasing her organs and made it all official. Not even when I kissed her goodbye knowing I’d never see her smile again.
Not even now, because I knew if I started crying—if I let even one single tear fall—I wouldn't stop. I'd crack in places too deep to be fixed. And no one would be there to put me back together.They’d just leave me bleeding wearing a fake smile and tell me that it would be alright. That I would heal in time.
But I was alone now, in a world I didn’t belong in. In a world I wasn’t sure I wanted to be in anymore.
So I stood there like a corpse dressed in a suit. Watching them bury the only person who ever knew me—reallyknew me—wondering if she was the lucky one.
Half the town had turned up for Mom’s funeral, and I should have felt comforted by that, but I didn’t. It was just the done thing in small towns like Whispering Cove. Weddings, christenings and funerals were whole-town events. You were expected to attend by an unspoken rule. You went even if you didn’t like the person, and no one questioned it. They just did. Like desperate sheep following an unspoken rule.
They came with their condolences like offerings at a funeral altar, pressing their pity into my palms like coins for the ferryman. I pasted on a manufactured smile while I screamed on the inside and accepted their hollow words and placations that didn’t do her justice;
“She was so lovely.”
“You were lucky to have her.”
“She will be missed. She was one of the good ones.”
“She’s in a better place.”
