Chapter 3
Josie
By Wednesday morning, the entire town of Clover Ridge knew a dead man was walking Main Street, and I had personally fielded eleven variations of the same conversation before I'd even gotten the ovens to temperature.
"Josie, honey, is it true?"
"Josie, I saw him at the diner, I nearly dropped my coffee—"
"Josie, does this mean the headstone comes down? Because my nephew does monument removal, family discount—"
That last one was Doreen Henderson, and I loved her, and I nearly threw a rolling pin at her.
"I don't know anything yet, Doreen."
"Well, when you do know things, you let me know. Forty years married and I've never once had my husband come back from the dead. Feels unfair, honestly."
"I'll pass along your feedback to the universe."
She patted my hand on her way out, not unkindly, and I stood behind my counter feeling like a woman standing in the eye of a storm that was, technically, about her own life, while everyone else got to watch it from a safe distance and comment on the weather.
By nine, I'd stopped counting the well-meaning interruptions and started simply nodding through them, a rhythm I fell into the way you fall into any survival skill — automatically, gratefully, without quite noticing you've developed it.
Mr. Castellano from the hardware store wanted to know if Cormac would need lumber, since apparently a man coming back from the dead was, in Mr. Castellano's mind, a home-improvement opportunity.
The Whitfield twins, nine years old and utterly without filter, cornered me by the register to ask if their old teacher, Mr. Vale, was a zombie now, and whether zombies could still teach shop class.
I told them no, he wasn't a zombie, and their disappointment was so profound I nearly laughed out loud in the middle of an otherwise devastating morning.
Even Reverend Thomas stopped by, hat in hand, looking genuinely unsettled in a way I'd never seen a man of his composure look before.
"I buried him," he said, quiet, almost to himself, standing at my counter like the words didn't fit right in his mouth.
"I said the words over that casket, Josie.
I've officiated a great many funerals in this town, and I have never once had the deceased simply — walk back into it. "
"Neither have I, Reverend."
"How are you? Truly?"
"I don't know yet," I told him, honest, because it was easier to be honest with him than with the customers who just wanted a good story to carry home. "I think I'm still waiting to find out."
He nodded slowly, patted my hand the same gentle way Doreen had, and left without buying anything, which told me more about the state of the whole town's nerves than any conversation could have.
Here is what nobody tells you about your dead husband coming back: the town's shock doesn't leave room for yours.
Everyone needed to process it with me, at me, near me, all day, wide-eyed and breathless, and I had to hold my own collapsing world together while also reassuring Mabel from the post office that no, I wasn't secretly furious she'd sent flowers to his funeral, that had been a lovely gesture, please stop apologizing for flowers, Mabel, that ship sailed two years ago.
Underneath all of it sat one fact so large I hadn't found the edges of it yet.
I still loved him.
Not "still" like an old habit I hadn't broken. Still like something that had never actually stopped, that I'd simply built an elaborate scaffolding around and called healing, and the scaffolding hadn't held up for one single night against the reality of his hands on my back.
It scared me more than the resurrection itself.
I'd built an entire life on the premise that this particular door was closed forever.
I'd grieved him properly — not performatively, not for an audience, but really, all the way down, the kind of grief that hollows you out and then, slowly, terribly, teaches you how to fill the space back in with something else.
I'd learned to sleep on his side of the bed because avoiding it felt more like a wound than using it did.
I'd learned to cook for one without the whole exercise ending in tears.
I'd built a business out of the wreckage of a kitchen I couldn't stand to be in anymore, and it had become mine in a way our shared kitchen never quite was, because I'd done it alone, with my own hands, out of the worst thing that ever happened to me.
And now the man that worst thing was named after was standing in my kitchen — my actual kitchen, the little one behind the shop, not our old one — making coffee exactly the way he used to.
Same amount of grounds. Same habit of tapping the spoon twice against the rim before he set it down. Small, stupid, devastating things.
"You still take it black," he said, not quite a question, handing me a mug.
"I still take it black." I wrapped both hands around it, more for something to hold onto than for the warmth. "You remembered."
"I remember everything," he said, quiet, like it cost him something to admit it.
"That's the thing about two years with nothing to do but remember.
I could recite our whole life back to you in order if you wanted.
Every argument. Every good morning. The exact words you used the day you said yes to me at the county fair, standing by the funnel cake stand, which is, incidentally, the least romantic location in human history and you still cried. "
"The funnel cake was very good that year."
"It was mediocre. You were being kind to the vendor."
I almost laughed. I hated that I almost laughed, two days into a resurrection I hadn't processed a single ounce of, and I set the coffee down harder than I meant to.
"I need you to understand something," I said.
"The two years didn't pause for me. I know they must have felt like a held breath for you, wherever you were — a gap, a wound, something you're on the other side of now.
For me, they were two years. I lived every single day of them. I changed. I'm not the woman you left."
"I know," he said. "I'm not asking you to be."
"You don't get to just decide that from a doorway, Cormac. You don't know who I became. You know who I was."
His jaw tightened, but he didn't argue, which was, I was learning, its own kind of argument — the old Cormac would have pushed, gently, persistently, trying to talk me around to his side of a thing.
This Cormac just absorbed it and waited, and something about the waiting made it worse, because it meant he'd changed too, and I didn't know that version any better than he knew mine.
"Tell me," he said. "Who did you become. I want to know. I don't want the version I imagined in a locked room. I want the real one."
And God help me, some small, disloyal, hopeful part of me wanted to tell him.
"I run this place almost entirely myself now," I said instead of answering the bigger question, because the bigger question needed more than a Wednesday morning and a lukewarm coffee.
"I do the books. I negotiate with suppliers.
I fired a wholesaler who tried to shortchange me on flour deliveries and I didn't cry about it afterward, which, a year before that, would have been unthinkable — the old me hated conflict, avoided it, let you handle anything that required a raised voice.
I don't avoid it anymore. I can't afford to. Nobody's coming to handle it for me."
"You built something," he said, and there was something in his voice I hadn't expected — not defensiveness, not grief for the version of me he'd lost. Something closer to awe.
"I had to."
"I know you had to." He looked around the little kitchen, at the shelves I'd organized my own way, the equipment I'd bought with my own money, the whole small stubborn architecture of a life I'd built without him in it.
"I'm not sorry you built it. I'm sorry I wasn't here to see it happen. Those are different things."
I didn't have an answer for that, so I didn't try to give him one.
I picked up my coffee and went out front, because the shop was going to open in twenty minutes whether or not I'd figured out how to feel about my dead husband, and grief — even this strange new inverted grief, grief for a death that turned out to be a lie — didn't get to close my register.
I thought about it all morning anyway, in the spaces between customers, the way you think about a bruise you keep accidentally pressing.
Who had I become. It wasn't a small question, and I didn't have a small answer, not one I could hand him over a lukewarm coffee in a kitchen that used to be entirely mine and was now, apparently, ours again by default, without either of us actually deciding that out loud.
I'd become a woman who didn't need rescuing.
That was the plainest way I could put it, turning it over while I restocked the pastry case, arranging croissants into their careful rows.
Before — and there was a before now, a clean line drawn through my life, before the casket and after it — before, I'd been someone who let Cormac handle the hard conversations, the confrontations, the parts of life that required raising your voice or holding your ground against someone bigger and louder.
I'd loved him for it, genuinely, the way you love anyone who takes a weight off your shoulders you didn't realize you were tired of carrying.
I just hadn't understood, back then, that letting him carry it had also meant I'd never learned to carry it myself.