The Dead Romantics (22)

No one was there.

Not your dad, and not the crazy-hot editor who was most certainly not dead.

I opened the door again.

And there Benji Andor stood as he had before.

Ghosts didn’t look like they did in the movies—at least from my experience. They weren’t mangled, flesh rotting off their bones. They weren’t pale as if some unfortunate actor had a bad run-in with baby powder, and they didn’t glow like Casper. They shimmered, actually, when they moved. Just enough to make them look a little wrong. Sometimes they looked as solid as anyone living, but other times they were faded and flickering—like a lightbulb on its last wire.

Benji Andor looked like that, standing on the welcome mat to the Days Gone Funeral Home. He looked like how his memories remembered him, the night in Colloquialism, his dark hair neatly gelled back, his suit jacket fitted to his shoulders, his black slacks pressed. His tie was a little askew, though, just enough to make me want to straighten it. My gaze lingered on his lips. I remembered them, the way they tasted.

But now he was—this man was— The spring wind that rattled through the dead oak tree didn’t mess up his hair, and the light from our foyer didn’t sit right on his face, and his shadow was gone. He shimmered, slightly, like a holograph in glitter. I reached out toward him, slowly, to touch his chest— And my hand went through him. It was cold. A burst of frost.

He stared down at my hand in his sternum, and I whispered just as he cursed— “Fuck.”





9





Dead on Arrival


“FLORENCE?” MOM CALLED from the parlor. “Is everything okay over there?”

I blinked, and Benji Andor was gone. I quickly drew my hand back and rubbed at my fingers. They tingled from where I’d touched—and gone through—him. He wasn’t really here. He wasn’t really dead.

I was losing my goddamn mind.

“Florence?” Mom put a hand on my shoulder, and I jumped in surprise. She gave me a worried look. “Are you okay? Who was that at the door?”

I shook my head, crossing my arms over my chest to warm my cold hand. “No one—I’m fine. It was, um—someone ding-dong ditched.”

She squeezed my shoulder.

“I’m fine,” I reiterated, and tried to shake off the encounter. Benji Andor wasn’t dead. I’d just groveled in his office yesterday. Kissed him last night behind the bar. He couldn’t be dead.

He wasn’t.

But if my mother was good at anything, it was seeing right through my lies. “You saw one, didn’t you? A ghost.”

“What? No—I mean. No,” I decided, because it was easier than trying to explain whatever had happened. Mom had enough to deal with already—she didn’t need her eldest daughter coming off the rails already. I had to be there for her. Not the other way around. I grabbed her hands and squeezed them tightly. “I’m fine,” I said again, and this time I put my heart into it. “I’m okay. Glad to be home.”

“I know it’s a lot,” she replied, and we moved out of the foyer and back toward the parlor again. “But things have changed. People have changed.”

But how much had stayed the same?

I couldn’t tell her that, at the airport, I had debated on whether or not to turn around and go back to my apartment. Skip the funeral. Burrow myself in a murder podcast. Try to forget that Dad was dead. That he was never coming back. That I would never get to, not ever, not while he was alive, tell him about my career, and my ghostwriting, and share with him all of the starred reviews and—

Stop. Stop thinking.

“Besides,” I said, trying to bury my thoughts, “I couldn’t let the family fall apart without their favorite disaster child.”

“You aren’t a disaster,” Mom chided.

“No, she definitely is,” Carver argued, and Mom hit him in the shoulder. Karen called her over and she left us for the parlor. Carver asked, putting his hands in his worn jean pockets, “Who was at the door?”

“A ghost.”

He blinked. As if he wasn’t sure whether I was lying or telling a particularly bad joke, but then I smiled and he barked a laugh. “Ha! If it was Dad, I hope you thoroughly chewed him out.”

“Gave him what for.”

“Really?”

“No. No one was at the door,” I lied, and he melted a little.

My brother was a lot of things—a smartass, a computer tech guru, and a gullible mess. He was like the glue that kept the Day siblings together. I couldn’t remember the last time Alice talked to me of her own volition.

“You never know. I mean, when we were kids—”

“How are you and Nicki?” I interrupted.

“Good,” he replied, annoyed that I’d changed the subject, but he took the hint as he led me back into the parlor. “So, did you figure out what to do with the editor for Christina Lauren?”

“Christina and Lauren write their own books,” I replied automatically. “But no, I didn’t.”

“So what happened?”

“Dad died. I came home.”

“You never turned it in?”

“Can’t turn in half a book.”

“Do you think you could—I don’t know—copy and paste the same chapter fifty times, turn that in, and by the time your editor realizes you turned in the wrong thing, you’d have the book done?”