Not then. Not until the kiss in the archway that had changed everything and nothing at once.
Natalie shifted in her chair. “You’ve been through a lot.”
“So have you.” Emma looked at her. “Your mother. Now Bridget.”
“This is different though. My mother died young. Still had decades left. This.” Natalie’s eyes moved back to the coffin. “Bridget lived. She loved my grandfather, raised my mother. When someone dies at eighty-eight after a life like that, it doesn’t feel stolen.”
The distinction landed. A life interrupted. A life finished. They weren’t the same, but it was still going to be hard to say goodbye to Bridget tomorrow.
8
The candlelight cast shadows across Emma’s face. Two days of travel from the other side of the world, and she still looked composed. Tired, yes—slight puffiness beneath her eyes, shoulders held as if carrying weight. But five years had changed her face. The softness had gone. Her cheekbones were more defined, her jaw sharper, and when she turned her head, the light caught her profile.
“I’m glad you were here with her,” Emma said.
Natalie blinked and pulled herself back.
“I know.” She wrapped both hands around her mug. “I’ve only been back two weeks. I got lucky. Though this last week, I started to worry. Twice she called me Siobhán—thought I was my mother. I wondered if the forgetfulness had become something worse. Dementia, maybe. But other times she was herself. Sharp as ever, telling me I’d overwatered the roses.”
Emma’s expression shifted. Not surprise, exactly. Something closer to recognition.
“She might not have been confused.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve been in hospice for two years. Palliative care.” Emma paused. “People near the end see things. People who’vealready died. Family, usually. It’s not like hallucinations from medication or low oxygen. They’re calm. They’ll look at an empty doorway and smile, say a name. It happens so often we don’t chart it as confusion anymore.”
Natalie stared at her.
“It’s almost expected,” Emma continued. “Like the people they loved are coming to lead them into whatever’s next.”
The room felt smaller. The candles. The basket coffin. Bridget’s folded hands.
“Oh my God.” Natalie’s voice thinned. “I thought she was losing it. I thought her mind was going and I just sat there and played along because I didn’t want to upset her. I didn’t correct her. I let her talk to me like I was Siobhán and I answered as best I could and the whole time I thought...”
She pressed her fingers against her mouth.
“You did exactly the right thing,” Emma said.
“But I didn’t know. I thought I was humoring her.”
“Natalie.” Emma’s voice was quiet and certain in the way only someone who had sat with the dying could be. “It’s possible that your mother was right there. Beside you, or behind you and Bridget wasn’t confused. She was seeing her.”
Natalie stood up and looked at the coffin. At Bridget’s face, so still, so finished. The fine white hair pinned back the way she’d always worn it. The hands folded over each other.
Her mother had been here. In this room. Standing close enough that Bridget could see her and speak to her and Natalie had been sitting right there and hadn’t known.
She pressed her palm flat against her sternum and held it there, as if she could press the feeling back inside before it broke the surface.
Natalie wasn’t exactly an atheist, probably agnostic. It wasn’t something she thought too much about, but now, she didn’t know what to think.
“And maybe she waited for you.” Emma’s gaze moved from the coffin to Natalie. “To come back. Before she let go. I’ve seen that more times than I can count. Someone holding on, right down to the hour that a loved one can fly home. The body barely functioning, organs shutting down, and they just keep going. And then the person walks through the door and sits down and holds their hand and within an hour, sometimes less, they’re gone.” She shook her head slowly. “It’s unbelievable. There’s no medical explanation for it. But it happens.”
Natalie turned the thought over. She had arrived on a Tuesday. Bridget had been fine that whole first week, shuffling between the kitchen and the front window, telling her about everything that had happened in the last year. And then the decline, quick and quiet, like a tide pulling out. The moments of calling her Siobhán. The long sleeps in the chair. And then Tuesday again, two weeks almost to the day, and Natalie had come in from the garden and found her.
Natalie pressed her lips together and breathed through her nose until the burning behind her eyes subsided.
The question came out in a quieter voice, softer than she’d intended, after the silence had stretched. Natalie looked at Emma’s profile outlined by the candlelight, her own curiosity turning over the unexpected turn in Emma’s career, trying to map it onto the woman she thought she’d known. “How did that happen?” she asked, letting her gaze rest fully on Emma. “Hospice. You were in emergency medicine before, weren’t you?”
