Chapter 2
I come to in what appears to be an office.
Strange. Call me old-fashioned, but I expected a hospital.
I look around and realize I’m still tensed. Still braced for impact. I force my shoulders to relax and release the tension my body’s holding on to. My inhale sounds like a gasp.
My heart beats out a quick, loud rhythm in my chest. My hands shake. Adrenaline courses through my body, at odds with the dullness of my surroundings.
The office appears to be ripped straight out of the 1970s. Teakwood-paneled walls. Furniture that somehow manages to be both colorful and drab. Mustard and orange everywhere. No windows; the only light comes from the yellow-hued overheads.
The room appears to be empty, but I jolt at the sound of a keyboard clacking.
I’m not alone.
The presence of another person in this strange space causes all my nerves to stand on end. I feel like my body’s fight-or-flight response has been activated, and everything in me is screaming, Fight! Or flight! Whichever! Both. Literally just do something.
I stand and see a young man sitting at the desk on the other side of an absolute monstrosity of a computer. He’s wearing horn-rimmed glasses and staring intently at his screen. I’d place him somewhere in his early twenties, if I had to hazard a guess.
“Where the hell am I?” I demand.
The man—the receptionist?—smiles up at me. Warm, comforting, inviting.
And yet, something is off. Something about his demeanor—his aura, I’d say, if I believed in auras—tells me not to trust him.
“This isn’t hell, honey. Don’t you worry,” he says, sounding disturbingly upbeat. I’m so thrown by the pep in his voice that it takes a moment for his words to register.
What a very odd thing to say.
And considering my last thought before he uttered those strange words was not to trust him, I’m feeling pretty damn worried.
I wasn’t worried about hell before this—had never really thought much about it, if I’m honest, the idea of an afterlife an overwhelming, nebulous concept I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around—but now I sure am.
“Where is it, then?”
“This is the waiting room.” He seems to think he’s being helpful.
“The waiting room,” I repeat flatly. “But I wasn’t in a waiting room, I was in my—”
I freeze. The motion reminds me of bracing for impact just… moments ago? But it couldn’t have been moments ago. That makes no sense.
I glance down. I’m still in the navy pantsuit I wore to work this morning. I meant to change before heading to Ellie’s party, but things ran late. I have a change of clothes in the trunk of my car. The car I was in just a minute ago, when…
None of this makes one single bit of sense.
“Your caseworker will be with you shortly. If you’d take a seat.” The receptionist waves toward the rows of empty chairs.
“If this is a waiting room, what am I waiting for?” And why do I feel like I won’t like the answer?
“You’re here to meet with your caseworker. Your caseworker will be with you shortly,” he repeats, slowly, his words overly enunciated.
Only now do I register how robotic the receptionist’s perkiness sounds. Does perkiness always sound so mechanical? It’s possible—I’ve never been a fan of perky people, but I don’t usually find them unsettling.
I’ve never felt this unsettled in my life.
“What case? What are you talking about?” I ask, desperation bleeding into my voice.
A door opens a few feet away from me. Was it there a second ago?
Of course it was. Doors don’t just appear out of nowhere.
People don’t just appear in 1970s-style offices out of nowhere.
Yet I seem to have done just that.
A woman steps through the doorway. She looks to be in her forties, a stern expression on her face, holding a manila folder. Smart brown pantsuit, also 1970s-ish, with bell-bottom pants. Nude brown lipstick painted across her lips.
My kind of woman.
She opens her folder and peers down at it. “Josephina Vasquez?”
“It’s Joey,” I correct on autopilot. Years of habit. “Who are you?”
“I’m your caseworker. Follow me.”
She doesn’t wait for a response before she turns on her heel and retreats through the doorway.
I glance at the receptionist, who nods. “Go ahead. Eternity waits for no one.”
Again, what a very odd thing to say. I can’t hold back my frown as I turn and follow the caseworker, realizing that whatever is going on, I trust her way more than I trust this dude.
I follow her down a long hallway. She walks with purpose, not once glancing back at me. I look down at her shoes. Heels that would clack on any hard floor, but her steps are muffled by the olive-green shag carpet under our feet.
This is the ugliest carpet I have ever seen in my life.
She steps into an office that looks a lot like the waiting room: Teakwood. Mustard. Drab. The carpet in here is the same shag texture as the one in the hall, only it’s a burnt-orange color.
I would like to amend my previous thought.
This is the ugliest carpet I have ever seen in my life.
That this stern, self-possessed woman in front of me—again, my kind of woman—works out of this ugly office simply does not make any sense. The image of this woman in this space, day in and day out, is so incongruous that it would be laughable if I had the capacity for humor right now.
She takes a seat behind a large executive desk. On top of it sits nothing but a single mug with a brown lipstick stain. No computer. No picture frames, no tchotchkes. Just the mug.
Such a huge desk, almost completely empty.
“Please, take a seat.” She gestures to the camel leather chair across from her and places the manila folder next to the mug.
Only one chair on this side of the desk.
Also strange. I’ve never given any thought to the fact that office desks almost always have two chairs in front of them until this moment.
The kind of norm you don’t really notice until it’s gone.
I take a seat, and she promptly opens the folder.
She stares down at it. Her voice dry, she says without looking at me, “Says here you died three minutes and forty-two seconds ago. Does that sound about right?”
I stutter out a pathetic attempt at a response. “I’m not—I didn’t—what?”
She peers up at me, a crease forming between her eyebrows.
“You don’t remember your death? It says here that drunk driving was the cause.”
“I had two glasses of wine,” I argue, not admitting that it would have been three had Alex not stopped me. Would’ve, could’ve, should’ve, but the important part is that I didn’t. It was two glasses of wine over the course of hours. “Is that really drunk driving?”
“It is if it results in a car accident. So you do remember?”
I stand and begin to pace, frustrated. “I was not drunk. I was distracted. And I’m not—” I can’t even say it. “I mean—that is, if I’m no longer… how am I here? Are you a figment of my imagination? Am I in a coma?”
“You’re here because you died. If you hadn’t died, you couldn’t be here.” She gestures at the general here around us.
“And here is where, exactly?”
“This is my office.”
Her words are slow, deliberate, like she thinks I’m stupid. Similar to the tone the receptionist used with me just moments ago.
“Okay, I’ll play along. If this is the afterlife—”
“It isn’t.”
“Then what is it?” I stop pacing.
“If you’ll sit, I’ll explain.”
I stare at her. She doesn’t even blink.
Oh, she’s good.
I sit but continue to stare. Now that I’ve had a moment to think, I say, “I motion to reduce my charges down to reckless driving.”
“You’re not being charged with anything.”
“Then why mention drunk driving?”
“Because that’s how you died,” she says simply.
“There is no way my blood alcohol was above the legal limit.”
“It was not,” she confirms.
“Then how—”
“We currently exist outside the boundary of laws.”
As if that isn’t a truly disturbing concept. Although I think she meant to reassure me.
She takes my silence as permission to continue.
“As I was saying, you died”—she consults the folder—“five minutes and eight seconds ago.”
I blink. Is the time written in the folder changing by the second? That doesn’t—
I catch myself in a cycle of the same thought on infinite loop.
Of course it doesn’t make sense; none of this does.
It’s all strange. It’s all weird. It’s all nonsense.
I pinch myself, and it hurts. Her eyes clock the movement, and something that looks almost like amusement tugs at her lips—but only for a moment; blink and you’d miss it.
She continues, “It says here that you left your living state behind with a multitude of regrets after spending the vast majority of your life profoundly unhappy. Does that sound right?”
“No,” I respond promptly, a hollow yet somehow weighty feeling in my chest. “No, that doesn’t sound right. I don’t have regrets, so you must have the wrong woman—”
“The file does not make mistakes.”
“Then why bother asking,” I mutter through gritted teeth.
“The file—”
I zero in on that manila folder. My file. A file of my life. Of my failures. Of my death. Of my darkest truths, evidently.
“You know what I think of your stupid file?”
I’m not proud of it, but I lean over the desk—hoist myself up over it, really; the thing is massive—and reach for the folder, but my caseworker grabs it and pulls it back.
“I want—to see it—” I gasp, still reaching.
“You can’t see it,” she says, sounding exasperated.
She stares at me like I’m a petulant child—I am acting rather like a petulant child, aren’t I? But then, who could blame me?
According to her, I have so many regrets—what’s one more?
“What the hell does it say?” I ask. I sit down and slump in my seat, defeated.
“Everything I just told you.”
“What else?”
“Carmen Vasquez. Sierra Vasquez. Javier Vasquez. Elijah Aarons. Alexander Aquino. Helen Cohen. Madison James. Jacob Kent. Drew Lopez—”
“Why are you listing everyone I’ve ever known?”
“They’re all associated with your regrets.”
“That’s not true.” I laugh. Sure, maybe the first few, but—“I haven’t thought about Drew in years.”