The Morning Of

By the morning of the funeral I hadn't slept in almost two days, running on the specific jittery energy of a person who knows something and has no way to make anyone else believe it.

I got to the funeral home early, before most of the guests, and stood by the closed casket for a long time just watching it, which probably looked, to anyone walking past, exactly like grief.

It wasn't grief. It was watching for a sound.

I didn't hear one, not that morning, not during the first twenty minutes of people filing in and hugging my mother and saying the things people say, and by the time the service actually started I'd half convinced myself that Corcoran was right, that warmth was just warmth, that I was a kid who couldn't accept what had happened and was inventing a version where I didn't have to.

Then, from three feet away, faint enough that I nearly told myself I'd imagined it, I heard the lid shift, just slightly, from the inside.