1. Theo
— ? —
Theo
Then - Six Weeks After the Crash
The child weighs nothing.
That’s the thought I can’t shake, standing in the back of this church with Lily pressed against my shoulder. She weighs nothing at all. Like grief has already started hollowing her out, making room for all the years of missing her mother that are coming.
She fell asleep twenty minutes into the service. I’m grateful for that. No child should have to sit through their own mother’s funeral with their eyes open.
Adrian is at the front, accepting another handshake, another murmured condolence. His suit is pressed. His hair is combed. He nods at all the right moments and says thank you and she would have appreciated you being here like he’s reading from a script someone handed him this morning.
I’ve known Adrian Walker for fifteen years. I was the best man at his wedding. I held his daughter before he did, because he was in the hallway calling his office while Nora was still in labor.
I know what his grief looks like.
This isn’t it.
The eulogy was twenty minutes ago, and I’m still thinking about it. The careful pauses. The way his voice cracked on my beautiful wife but not on Nora. The glance at his watch, subtle, quick, but I saw it, halfway through his own speech about the woman he married.
He looked at his watch during her eulogy.
“Theo.” Brielle materializes beside me, her hand finding my arm. “How are you holding up?”
The hug she pulls me into lasts a beat too long. Her perfume soaks into my coat, heavy and sweet, and I notice it the way you notice anything at a funeral, numbly, filing it away without knowing I’m filing it.
“I’m fine,” I lie. “It’s Lily I’m worried about.”
“She’s lucky to have you.” Brielle’s eyes are wet, but something about them isn’t sitting right with me. Like she’s performing the tears instead of feeling them. “Adrian’s lucky to have you. We all are.”
Across the church, Adrian catches Brielle’s eye over the shoulder of whoever he’s talking to. It’s a quick look. A nothing look.
Except it’s not nothing, is it? That’s a look that means something. That’s a look between two people who share something they can’t say out loud.
I file that too.
At the graveside, everyone bows their heads while the priest says words that are supposed to mean something. Lily wakes up halfway through and blinks at the casket being lowered into the ground.
“Uncle Theo?”
Her voice is small, barely there. I shift her higher on my hip.
“Yeah, sweetheart?”
“Is Mommy in the box?”
I open my mouth to say yes. It’s what you’re supposed to say. It’s the gentle lie that parents tell children when the truth is too big and too dark and too forever.
But I can’t say it. Because there is no body.
They told us that, at the hospital. The river was too high, the current too strong. They found the car three miles downstream, empty. They searched for days. Divers. Dogs. Nothing.
There was never a body.
“She’s-” My throat closes around the words. “She’s somewhere safe, Lily. Somewhere you can’t see.”
It’s not an answer. She knows it’s not an answer. Six weeks ago, this child was too young to understand death at all, and now she’s staring at an empty casket with eyes that are already learning how to doubt the adults who are supposed to know things.
“But is she in the box?”
I can’t lie to her. I won’t.
“No, baby. She’s not in the box.”
Lily considers this for a long moment, then puts her head back on my shoulder and says nothing at all.
The crowd disperses slowly. People offer me more condolences than they offer Adrian, which is strange until I remember that most of these people knew me and Nora first.
We grew up together. I introduced her to Adrian at my own birthday party, and I spent the next three years watching her fall in love with my best friend, and I smiled at their wedding while something inside me quietly died.
I never told her. Some things you don’t say out loud.
And now she’s gone, and I never said it, and Adrian is standing at the edge of the grave with Brielle’s hand on his arm while people walk past pretending not to notice.
Everyone leaves eventually. The groundskeepers hover at a polite distance, waiting to fill in the hole.
Adrian and Brielle left together thirty minutes ago.
I should have offered to take Lily, but Brielle swept her up before I could, murmuring something about getting her home, and Adrian just… let it happen.
He let another woman carry his daughter away from her mother’s funeral.
I stay.
The afternoon light goes gold and then gray and then the groundskeepers give up pretending to be patient and start shoveling anyway. I watch them fill in the grave while the last of the daylight drains away.
The box is empty.
The thought won’t leave me alone. It’s not grief. It’s something else. Something that feels like a hand pressed against a closed door, waiting for it to open.
“You’re not in there,” I say out loud. The groundskeepers glance at me and then quickly look away, the way you look away from anyone talking to a grave. “You’re not in there, and I don’t know where you are, but you’re not-”
My voice breaks. I let it.
I stand there until full dark, and I do not say goodbye.
I don’t know why I can’t. Some part of me, stupid, irrational, grieving, won’t let the word form in my mouth. As if saying it would make it true. As if the casket being empty means anything other than a body lost to the river.
She’s not in the box.
I get in my car. I sit in the parking lot with my hands on the wheel for a long time.
Alone in the dark, with nobody to hear me, I say her name out loud for the first time since they told me she was dead.
“Nora.”
It sounds wrong. It sounds like a question. It sounds like the beginning of something instead of the end.
I drive home with her name still on my lips and the empty box still in my head, and I don’t sleep for three days.