Chapter 1
Olivia
Istopped counting the casseroles at seventeen.
They would be lining the granite countertops like a barricade, wrapped in tin foil and blue painter's tape. The Millers. The Hendersons. 350 degrees for 45 minutes. Everyone brought lasagna or tuna noodles, heavy dishes meant to weigh you down, to keep you tethered to the earth when you were threatening to float away.
Someone had brought a glazed ham.
Ryan hated ham. It was a texture thing—the sweetness against the salt, the way the meat shredded. In eight years of marriage, I had never once bought a ham. I knew he picked the pepperoni off his pizza until a little pile of cured meat sat on his napkin like an offering, just as I knew he only took his coffee black because he was too lazy to buy creamer. He was predictable. He slept on his stomach with one arm flung over his head, fingers curled as if he were trying to catch something in a dream.
I knew these things. I was the archivist of his preferences.
And yet, there was a ham on my counter.
The organ swelled, pulling me back. I was in the front row of the sanctuary, where the air smelled like wet wool and lilies.The scent was cloying, almost medicinal, the smell of a nursing home trying to mask a decline. The pastor—a man Ryan had met maybe twice—was talking about resurrection. He kept saying Ryan's name with two distinct syllables. Ry-anne. Stretching it out until it sounded like a stranger’s name.
Ryan would have hated this. The suffocating scent of the lilies, the low drone of the organ, his mother's weeping — the way she dampened the silk of my dress until I felt her grief soaking through to my skin.
But most of all, he would have hated the slideshow.
It looped on a screen behind the pulpit. Ryan on a boat, the colors oversaturated, too blue. Ryan holding a beer at a tailgate. Ryan on our honeymoon in Maui, his arm around my waist—one of the few photos where we're both in frame because a waitress offered to take it.
I took almost all the others. In a slideshow of forty-three pictures, I was in six. I was the operator, the witness, the one standing just outside the frame ensuring the lighting was right.
"He looks so happy," someone whispered behind me.
I didn't turn around. If I moved, the numbness holding my spine together might snap. I just stared at the casket at the front of the room—polished mahogany with brass handles that caught the light from the stained glass. It looked expensive and permanent and wrong. Ryan was six-foot-two. He took up space. He filled rooms with his laugh, his opinions, the way he'd leave his coffee cup on every surface. Now he was contained, reduced to something that could be carried by six men and lowered into the ground.
The service ended and the organ played something somber. Six men stood and moved to the front — faces I recognized but couldn't place in the fog, Ben Walsh at the back corner. They lifted the casket onto their shoulders with practicedcoordination, the funeral director murmuring instructions I couldn't hear.
I followed them out into the January cold.
The ride to the cemetery dissolved into a wash of gray. Ryan's mother gripped my hand, her palm damp and trembling, while the cold of the leather seat seeped through the silk of my dress. Beyond the tinted glass, the world was reduced to skeletal trees and dirty snow, but I wasn't watching the road.
I was back on my porch, shivering in the doorway on Friday night.
"Black ice," the officer had said. "Route 9, just past the reservoir."
He had delivered the news with soft-spoken pity, the kind that came from doing this too many times. But the words hadn't made sense. They were puzzle pieces from two different boxes.
"You mean Route 95," I'd told him. It hadn't been a question. Ryan worked downtown. He took 95 to Exit 4. Twenty-three miles, door to door. He drove the same route, in the same lane, every day for eight years.
But the officer had shaken his head. Not 95.
Route 9. Heading west. Past the reservoir, through the dark stretch of farmland and state forest. It was the opposite direction of home. Nowhere we ever went. Nowhere Ryan had any reason to be.
The limousine slowed, tires crunching over gravel, pulling me out of the memory.
The cemetery air bit through my coat as someone guided me to a folding chair under a canvas tent that snapped in the wind. The hole in the ground was clean-edged, perfectly rectangular. Ryan would have made a joke about that. Something inappropriate about fit or measurements that would've made me elbow him in the ribs.
But Ryan wasn't here to whisper anything.
The casket sat on a silver frame above the hole, held by canvas straps. I watched the straps instead of looking at the casket. They were easier. Mechanical. I could focus on how they worked, the weight they held, the small details that didn't require feeling anything.
The pastor opened his book. The wind snapped the canvas of the canopy tent, drowning out the first few words of the scripture. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.
Then the gears caught. The straps loosened with a low mechanical whir, and the casket descended into the earth with a slowness that felt obscene.
