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I’d have time to stand in front of Lakelyn as a living man again, time to look the people responsible for my death in their faces, and time to finally finish the shit that had been hanging over me for six fucking years.

And if I still had hours left before sunrise once all that was handled?

Yeah… I already knew exactly where I planned to spend them.

Miss Veda started toward the door, but before she could disappear on me, a question I’d had since we first met came back to mind.

“Hold up.”

She stopped. “What now, Caspian?”

“I got a question.”

“You always have a question.”

“Yeah, but I been sitting on this one for five years, so I feel like that should count for something.”

Her eyes narrowed slightly, already suspicious.

I smiled. “How did you die? What’s your story?”

The amusement left her face. “Caspian.”

“Come on, Miss Veda. Five years? I think I done earned at least the obituary version. I ain’t asking for crime-scene photos.”

I expected her to tell me to mind my damn business like she had the first time I asked.

Instead, she went quiet.

For once, Miss Veda didn’t have some slick answer waiting for me. Her fingers moved over one of the rings on her hand, turning it slowly before she finally spoke.

“I was sixty-two.”

I straightened a little.

“I had been married for thirty-nine years… three children, five grandchildren… almost.”

“Almost?”

Her mouth trembled so slightly I might’ve missed it if I hadn’t been looking directly at her.

“My youngest daughter went into labor early. I was on my way to the hospital to be with her when a drunk driver ran a red light and hit the driver’s side of my car.”

All the smart shit I usually had ready disappeared.

Miss Veda looked down at her hands. “I had spent two months crocheting a blanket for that baby. Yellow, because my daughter refused to find out what she was having. It was sitting in the passenger seat beside me.”

“Damn.”

She swallowed before continuing. “My granddaughter was born forty-three minutes after I died. I never got to hold her, never heard her cry… never got to tell my daughter that she was going to be all right.” Her voice remained steady, but her eyes had gone glossy. “And my husband had to leave the hospital where his granddaughter had just been born to go identify his wife.”

“Damn, Miss Veda.”

That was all I had.

For the first time since I’d known her, she looked less like some all-knowing woman who had the afterlife figured out and more like somebody’s mama, wife, and grandma who had been ripped away from a life she still wanted.

She took a breath and blinked the moisture from her eyes before it could fall.