The woman gets up to look out of the window, her heart sinking at the sight of quivering branches on winter-bare trees. She wishes that Valentine’s Day—that every holiday—could be different for them, but she knows that it probably never will be. Resigned to that fact, she turns to look at her silent daughter in the bed, only to see her daughter looking right back at her.

“Hi, Mom,” the girl says, her voice weak and raspy.

“Allie?” The woman hurries to her daughter, sitting in the chair beside her, taking her curled hand, and holding it—and for the first time in a very, very long time, that hand squeezes back.

“Sorry I’ve been gone for so long,” Allie rasps.

“It’s okay, honey,” the mother says. “Oh my God, it’s okay.” Tears burst from the woman’s eyes, falling more powerfully than the rain outside. They are tears of joy, because finally, after all these years, she’s been given permission to cry.

Picture this:

A skateboarder in New York City awakes to find himself on a street corner in the middle of the day. He looks around, and the world seems strange. Sounds are hollow, people pass by as blurs, and the colors all seem muted except for him, his skateboard, and the spot that he’s on. He turns to see a boy sitting on the curb across the street, also in perfect focus, watching him. As he goes over to the boy, he notices that there’s something wrong with the ground. It feels as if it’s melting beneath his feet.

The boy who’s been watching him smiles and stands up. He wears pressed pants and a leather jacket over a white shirt and a dark tie.

“What’s going on here? Am I dreaming? Am I drugged?” the skateboarder asks.

“Neither,” says the smiling boy. “You’ll want to tell me your name now. I’ll write it down in case you forget it.”

“Very funny,” says the skateboarder, and yet as he tries to say his name, it takes him a moment to pull it up. “Kyle.”

“Nice to meet you, Kyle. I’m Nick.” He shakes Kyle’s hand, writes his name on a piece of paper, then sticks it in Kyle’s shirt pocket. “Do you remember what happened?”

“Yeah,” says Kyle, scratching his head. “I came out of that alley, and almost got hit by a garbage truck.”

Nick shakes his head. “Hate to tell you this, Kyle. But it wasn’t ‘almost.’”

“No way, man. That’s not even funny”

The smile never leaves Nick’s face. “Check your pockets,” he says.

“What for?”

“You’ll see.”

Kyle reaches into his pocket and pulls out a bunch of spare change, and out of the change, Nick retrieves a funny-looking coin with a faded face.

“You’ll want to keep this,” Nick says, and puts it in Kyle’s shirt pocket as well. “Be careful not to lose it.”

Now as Kyle looks at the people around him—how they don’t see him, how they actually walk past him, and some walk right through him, he realizes the truth.

“I’m . . . dead?”

“I’m sorry, Kyle. I’m also sorry that you didn’t make it into the light, but you will. In the meantime, I know a place you can stay for free right here in New York. You can even have your own apartment there. The only rules are that you have to do something different every day, and you can only ‘rent’ for one month at a time.”

“Why? What happens at the end of the month?”

“At the end of each month, you check with the coin,” Nick says. “It will tell you if you’re ready to move ‘uptown.’”

And although it doesn’t make much sense to Kyle yet, he follows Nick. Something inside Kyle tells him he can trust this kid—that Nick truly has his best interests at heart.

“So this place I’m staying . . . ,” asks Kyle. “Am I gonna like it?”

“I think you’ll love it,” says Nick, with a smile that’s just a little bit mischievous. “And you won’t believe the view!”