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“Yeah, hey! This is crazy. I had no idea you lived around here. My car broke down just over there.” She gestured an arm toward a strategic parking job by the curb. “And my cell’s dead. I’ve been knocking on doors trying to find someone who wouldn’t mind letting me use their phone, but people really take the whole ‘stranger danger’ thing to heart around here.”

“Well, good thing I’m not a stranger,” came Ian’s reply in a tone that made Jack want to gag. “Please, come in. Mi teléfono es su teléfono. It’s been too long. If you’re not in a rush, I’d love to catch up.”

“You’re a hero,” Greer cooed, and Jack did gag a little.

Greer disappeared from the doorstep and Jack shifted focus to the window, allowing time for the gracious host to fetch some sort of beverage from the kitchen. It was the very least of what Jack would do if Greer showed up on his doorstep after all those years. Unfortunately for him, he’d been forced into an afterlife intervention before he’d had the chance.

A few moments later, Greer’s upper half appeared in the window. She was talking about something Jack couldn’t hear, giggling a laugh Jack didn’t need to be in earshot of for it to play like a music box tune in his mind. She looked down at Jack and Carter without letting her jovial expression shift, giving an almost imperceptible nod to her team before disappearing back into the living room.

Jack and Carter rounded the house, opening the metal gate with a muffled snap of the lock. The backyard was a compact affair, longer than it was wide and featuring only a well-kept rectangle of grass and a little shed toward the very back of the space. The dog door looked smaller than it had online, clearly built for a pet of appropriate town house size rather than something more comparable to Margaret in stature as they’d hoped: perhaps a rottweiler or a recently groomed chow chow.

“I’m not sure Margaret’s done enough yoga for this,” Jack hissed over his shoulder at Carter, who loomed over him from Jack’s position on all fours. His joints popped and creaked as he attempted to contort the arthritic body wrapping around him, knees and shoulders and spine alternating their aches. Finally he slunk headfirst into the kitchen, feeling not completely unlike he’d just been given birth to. The floor tiles were cool beneath his palms as he crawled the last of his lower half out of the dog door.

Something tip-tap tip-tapped into the room. Jack looked up just in time to catch sight of a drooling brown-and-white bulldog sliding into the kitchen doorway, jowls swinging with wild abandon. It locked eyes with the intruder on the floor and immediately burst into a series of guttural barks as it barreled toward Jack at full speed.

Jack had never been much of a dog person in life, and this wasn’t helping their cause. The creature reached him before he could pull himself to his feet, forcing Jack to roll out of the way of the slobbery security system. For its part, the dog seemed to interpret the move as an invitation to play, and now, instead of facing a protective attack, Jack had fifty pounds of unadulterated K-9 bounding at him with unbridled enthusiasm. Jack continued to roll across the floor as the dog landed on him with heavy paws. His back thwacked hard against a row of cabinets under the sink. The dog skidded across the floor and raced after him. Jack pulled the cabinets open behind him, fumbling around until he found the one housing the garbage can. He felt through the can, eyes locked on the dog, his fingers wrapping around a discarded toast crust just as the animal reached him.

Jack held the crust up before the dog, wincing in preparation for another lunge in his direction. Instead the dog froze, staring up at the crust as though it held all the wisdom of the universe. Jack hurled the crust across the room, sending the dog after it in a sliding tizzy. He slumped back against the counter, catching his breath. The crust would only buy him seconds, and he needed that time to hoist his aching body upright and unlock the door for Carter. But just as he began to ease himself to his feet, footsteps sounded from the hallway.

“Sorry, he’s not usually like this.” Ian’s voice floated into the kitchen as the hardwood floor creaked under his weight just beyond.

Jack froze.

The dog was just finishing its whole wheat distraction. It would be running back to Jack any second now. Probably around the same any second that its owner would be walking into the kitchen, only to find the little old woman from work plopped on the floor. Jack was not a fan of that second. His hand was still on the door of the cabinet containing the garbage can. He looked down at the body he’d taken: the spindly arms, the generous bosom, the soft middle, the legs that ended not far from where they began. The thought wouldn’t have even crossed his mind a few short months ago. It simply wouldn’t have been possible. But as the footsteps grew nearer and the dog swallowed its last bite of crust, Jack knew he didn’t have a choice. Without a second thought, he shoved the bin to one side and hurled himself backward into the garbage cabinet, closing the door behind him.

In the dark of the cabinet, Jack couldn’t see the knees he’d pulled to his chest, but he sure could feel them. His back, now hunched into a letter C, might never straighten again if the way each vertebra seemed to lock was any indication. Something wet came snuffling at the crack in the cabinet door. The dog, seeking another trash treat.

“Bentley.” Ian’s voice, now just beyond the door. “What is it, boy?” Footsteps drawing nearer.

All it would take was that cabinet door opening and Jack would be fully exposed to the world. He pulled his knees closer, smooshing his bust, as if he could make himself so small he wouldn’t be spotted.

“Ian?” Greer’s voice, distant but distinctly hers. “Everything okay?”

A shift in the footsteps directly in front of the cabinet. A beat, during which Jack failed to breathe. Then, “Yeah, coming!”

The footsteps, human and dog, receded. Jack waited until the silence held for ten Mississippis before cracking the door. The kitchen stood empty again, only a small collection of breadcrumbs offering proof he hadn’t always been alone. Jack eased one foot out of the cabinet and then the other, feeling like a piece of origami being unfolded by a particularly rough-handed child. Every bend left a cramp in his muscles, a twinge in his joints.

Finally fully unfolded, Jack hobbled over to the back door and unlocked it, poking his head out and signaling to Carter, who hovered just to the side of the door.

“What took you so long?” Carter whispered as he sauntered over.

Jack, who was still trying to remember how to inhale and exhale in proper rhythm, just shook his head and ushered Carter inside.

They snuck through the hallway and up the stairs, separating at the top. Jack took the office, Carter the bedroom. The taupe office walls were lined with shelves of books about finance and cryptocurrency and manifestation, wedged between busts of great thinkers and marble globes. A mahogany desk sat just under the window, holding only a computer and a plastic plant. Jack pried open the desk drawers and rifled through the loose sheets of paper within, finding little more than old employee evaluations and notes on budgeting.

Jack took each book off the shelves and shook them out one by one in case Ian had secreted the Master List between their pages, but all that fell out was an old receipt for contact lenses used in place of a bookmark. Despite his cramping joints, he crouched to the floor and peered under every piece of furniture on the off chance the list had been stashed underneath, but came up empty-handed.

Footsteps in the hallway. Jack hurried to his feet and scrambled for something to hide behind or—thanks to his cabinet adventures—inside of, when Carter materialized in the doorway. He shook his head at Jack. So no luck there, either. That didn’t mean Ian was in the clear, of course, but they couldn’t risk taking more time than they already had. With any luck, Greer would have taken the opportunity to sniff out the main floor when Ian went to the kitchen. She might have found something they hadn’t.

All that remained was to creep downstairs and give Greer the signal that it was time to go. As the newly minted lightest You Again, that job fell to Jack, being that he was now the least likely to make the hardwood creak. Carter made his way out the back door while Jack slipped down the hall toward the living room, where Greer and Ian’s voices tripped over each other in friendly conversation. He padded closer until he was near enough to use the marble in his pocket. It was the same one he’d always used in situations like this, a cat’s-eye he’d won on the playground in third grade. But this time something was different. Just as he reached into his pocket, the words drifting out of the living room took shape, shifting from the loose fog of distant voices into comprehensible conversation.

“Two girls, wow. I’m sure you’re an amazing mom,” came Ian’s voice. “And this is the same guy you met in college, right?” There was a note of disappointment in his tone. Jack had begged Greer to play single for this, but she’d insisted that once she’d made it inside, she’d be able to stall Ian with or without a ring on her finger.

“Yeah, the same guy,” said Greer. “We’re coming up on twenty years.”

“Well, congrats.” Ian’s voice was flat for that, but it seemed to perk up a bit as he said, “Sorry to hear he’s so sick, though.”

“Thanks. The treatment he needs is expensive, but we’re hoping to be able to get it for him very soon.” Greer’s own voice flared with determination. Jack knew that tone as well as he knew his own reflection. When Greer wanted something, she’d do whatever it took to get it, and many times that meant convincing Jack to help. Only this time Jack suddenly found himself in the dark on what she actually wanted help with. She’d always been direct and up-front. Greer wasn’t one to pull punches, especially not with him. Her words to Ian hit Jack across the chin like a right hook. She’d lied to him. It wasn’t her daughter who was sick, it was her husband. She wouldn’t be misleading Ian about this; she had no reason to. But what reason did she have to lie to Jack?