She went back.

The consultation room was the same. Martin was talking about service options. The father was nodding. Siobhán was sitting in the chair with her hands in her brother's sleeves and her eyes on the table and her whole body held together by the jumper and the chair and the room and nothing else.

Mollie sat down.

Martin glanced at her. She gave him the look, the one that meant I'm fine, keep going, and he kept going, and the meeting continued, and Mollie sat across from Siobhán Hennessey and did her job.

But.

At the end, when the father stood and shook Martin's hand and Siobhán gathered herself for the walk to the door, Mollie said:

"Siobhán."

The girl turned. Up close her eyes were green. Charlie's had been brown. The jumper was navy. Charlie's favourite had been burgundy. She was not Mollie. She was not Charlie's sister. She was someone else's sister standing in someone else's grief wearing someone else's jumper, and she was also, in the ways that mattered, exactly the same.

"The Uber thing," Mollie said. Quietly. Martin was at the desk. The father was signing papers. It was just them. "It wasn't the last thing you said to him."

Siobhán's face tightened. "It was."

"No. It was the last thing you said out loud. But the last thing you said to him was every time you put on that jumper. Every time you say his name. Every time you..." She stopped. She was on the edge of something she couldn't come back from, the edge of the professional and the personal, the edge of the armour, and she could feel Martin's attention from across the room. "You're still talking to him. That's the last thing. The conversation isn't over. It just changed."

Siobhán looked at her. The green eyes, swollen, searching. Looking for the thing people looked for in funeral homes: permission. Permission to be broken. Permission to still be talking to someone who couldn't hear.

"How do you know?" the girl said.

Mollie held her gaze. Held it the way Fayiz held hers across the booth: steadily, without flinching, with the full weight of a person who was not going to look away.

"I just do," she said.

Siobhán's mouth trembled. She didn't cry. She nodded, once, and pulled the jumper tighter, and walked out with her father into the March afternoon, and the door closed, and the consultation room was empty, and Mollie stood there for a long time.

Martin appeared beside her.

"You alright?"

"Yeah."

"You were gone for a while."

"Four minutes."

Martin looked at her. The look of a man who had worked with the dead for thirty years and could read the living like a book. He didn't push.

"Good girl," he said. And went back to his office.

☕︎

She finished the day.

Two more consultations. A viewing at 4. A phone call from a woman in Conception Bay who wanted to know if her mother's ashes could be scattered at sea and, if so, which sea, and did it matter, and was there a form. Mollie answered everything. She was professional. She was kind. She was the face and the voice and the armour.

At 5:30 she locked up. Walked home. The March air was different from February's... still cold, but with an edge of something underneath, something that suggested the cold was temporary, that the world was tilting toward a season it hadn't reached yet.

At the flat, she stood in the hallway. Coat off. Scarf on the hook. Three loops, folded twice.

The painting was on the wall above the radiator. The diner. The booth. Two cups. The warm light. She looked at it the way she looked at it every night: the way you looked at proof that someone saw you.

She went to the kitchen. The plant was on the windowsill. The plant she'd inherited from Dana, who'd left it behind along with the Post-it and the good towels and the particular silence of a flat that had been shared and then wasn't. It was an aloe. She didn't know what kind. She'd been calling it the plant for two years because naming things meant caring about them and caring about things meant they could be taken.

It was slightly less yellow than it had been in December. She'd been watering it, not on a schedule, not with discipline, but often enough that it had responded by not dying, which was, she supposed, the plant equivalent of showing up for breakfast twice a week.

She hadn't watered it in a week. She'd been, she didn't have an excuse. She'd been living. She'd been busy surviving and going to work and going to breakfast and carrying the email and the painting and the because it's Thursday and she had forgotten to water a plant that was depending on her to not forget.

She filled a glass. Poured it into the pot. The right amount. She was learning.

She looked at the plant. The slightly-less-yellow leaves. The way it leaned toward the window, toward the light, the way living things leaned toward whatever kept them alive.

"You need a name," she said.

She said it to the plant. To the kitchen. To the flat that was dark and cold and still hers, still the place she came back to every night, still the ceiling and the crack and the floor and the window.

She'd been calling it the plant because naming things meant caring. And caring meant loss. And loss was the thing she'd structured her entire life around avoiding, was the reason she'd come to Newfoundland, was the reason she'd signed a contract on a napkin, was the reason she'd planned to die in twenty-seven days.

But she'd called Fayiz from a bathroom at 2:30 on a Thursday afternoon and he'd answered on the second ring and he'd told her to look at the tiles and she'd looked at the tiles and come back. She'd gone back to the consultation room and sat across from a girl who was wearing her dead brother's jumper and she'd said: the conversation isn't over. It just changed.

She'd said that. To a stranger. About a brother. And she'd meant it. And if she'd meant it, if the conversation with the dead wasn't over, if it just changed, then maybe caring about things that could be taken wasn't the worst thing. Maybe naming things was how you kept them.

She looked at the plant.

"Gregory," she said.

She didn't know where it came from. It wasn't a family name. It wasn't a reference. It was just the word that arrived when she opened her mouth, the way yes had arrived in the diner when Fayiz asked her to come for Christmas, the way okay had arrived when he said because it's Thursday, a word that came from the part of her that was not the armour and not the wall and not the performance but just Mollie, just the person underneath all of it, choosing to name a thing because the naming mattered.

"Gregory," she said again. Testing it. It fit. The way some names did, immediately, inevitably, as if the thing had always been called that and was just waiting for someone to notice.

Gregory said nothing. Gregory was a plant.

But he looked slightly greener in the dark, or she was imagining it, or she was learning to see things the way a painter saw them, not as they were but as they were becoming.

She pressed her forehead against the kitchen wall. Cool, smooth, real.

"Twenty-seven days, Charlie," she said to the wall. "Twenty-seven days. And I named a plant. And I called a man from a bathroom. And a girl came in wearing her brother's jumper and I told her the conversation isn't over and I meant it. I meant it, Charlie. What does that mean?"

Charlie didn't answer. Charlie never answered.

But the flat was quiet in the way it had been after the coming-out, after the okay: not the empty kind. The other kind. The kind that had space in it. The kind that felt like a room where something was starting to grow.

Twenty-seven days.

☕︎