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Albert was asleep when I walked into work Monday morning.

Not subtly asleep, either. Not the polite, chin-dropping, I’m-just-resting-my-eyes version. No—this was full commitment. His head was tipped back, his mouth open, and a newspaper was sliding slowly down his chest as a faint snore rattled through the room like an old engine trying to turn over.

Sterling’s voice drifted through my head—I’ve got an idea for a job you might like—and I found myself picturing the local law office he’d mentioned…

It had to be more riveting than this.

I hadn’t even let myself think about law since David. After him, the idea of arguing for anything had felt impossible. I’d forgotten how to trust my own voice, let alone use it.

Three years was a long time to be away from a law office. Three years was long enough to live a dozen different lives, most of them messy. I’d told Sterling that version of me was gone…that I wasn’t sure I knew how to be her anymore.

But that thought didn’t land the same way now. For the first time in a long time, it didn’t feel like something I’d lost. It felt…reachable.

“Good morning,” I said loudly.

Albert didn’t respond.

Stepping closer, I set my bag down a little louder than necessary. The desk wobbled, the newspaper on him slipped another inch…but still nothing.

It was actually impressive.

I reached out and plucked the pen from where it was loosely clutched in his hand…and that did it. Albert jerked awake with a startled snort, his eyes snapping open as he grabbed for the missing pen like I’d just stolen a vital organ. “I was working,” he said immediately.

“Of course you were.”

He narrowed his eyes at me, then glanced down at the newspaper like it had just ratted him out. “Important review of last night’s duck crossing committee,” he muttered.

“Riveting, I’m sure.”

“Safety concerns,” he added defensively.

“For the ducks?”

“They wander,” he said, as if that explained everything, as he huffed and shoved the paper aside. Then he squinted at me for a second longer than was comfortable. “You showed up again.”

“That is typically how jobs work.”

“Hm.” He didn’t sound convinced, but he reached into one of his leaning towers of paperwork and yanked out a thick stack, the edges worn and uneven. “You can organize these.”

I took them, flipping through just enough to see dates scattered across the last decade. “What am I organizing?”

“Deaths,” he said, already leaning back in his chair. “Put them in order. Make sure nothing’s missing.”

“Comforting.”

“People die.” He shrugged. “We keep track of it.”

“Do you have anything less ominous? Birthdays? Bake sales?”

“No one ever files the bake sales right,” he muttered, already drifting again. “Chaos.”

I nodded in agreement before turning away.

The back table had become my unofficial workspace, so I spread the files out there, stacking them by year before settling into the chair. Okay. Deaths. I could handle that. It wasn’t the first time I’d had to sit still in the middle of something heavy and pretend it didn’t touch me.

At first, it was…normal. Or as normal as small-town records of people dying could be. There were accidents and illness. The occasional “circumstances under investigation” that never seemed to get updated. I sorted and stacked, checking dates as I went and making notes whenever something felt out of place, and after a while, it became almost calming.

Until it wasn’t.