I wonder what will happen to me now, if I have to stand in the Hall of Two Truths and defend my actions. If I’ll qualify as akhu, the blessed dead, or if I’ll just be damned, mut, gone. If I’ve done something unforgivable, or if I’ve moved closer to the person I was meant to be with.

In the Netherworld, the blessed dead and the damned share the same space. In the New Kingdom’s Book of Gates—a later funerary text—there is a lake, which is cool water for the blessed dead but feels like a lake of fire for the damned.

I fall asleep fitfully, thinking of fire and drowning, and wake up when the door to Wyatt’s room bursts open. I jackknife up, forgetting where I am for a moment, and Wyatt has the grace to throw the sheet over me. Sunlight floods the tiny room, and I think maybe we have overslept, but then I remember it is Friday, our day off. Alberto is standing in the doorway, and my stomach flips, thinking that I have finally given him a reason to hold me in contempt. But he doesn’t even seem to notice me. “Dailey’s here,” he bites out.

“Fuck.” Wyatt leaps out of bed, grabbing clothes from where they’ve been draped on his desk chair, hopping into his boots. He scrubs his hands through his hair, trying to rake it into a semblance of order. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” he mutters, streaking through the hallway and leaving me behind.

Alberto blinks at me in Wyatt’s bed. “You’d better get dressed.”

I wonder if Wyatt has told his benefactor that I asked to work at the site, if he is going to be in trouble for hiring me without getting approval first. “Is Dailey going to be upset to find me here?”

“Yeah,” Alberto replies. “You could say that.”

I gesture to the door, rolling my eyes so that he’ll close it, and then hop up and throw on my clothing from last night. I’m still tying off the bottom of my braid when I burst into the kitchen area, determined to make sure that Wyatt doesn’t take the fall for something I asked him to do.

Sitting at the kitchen table is a woman with raven-black hair piled onto her head, wearing a light linen shirt and the kind of torn jeans that are so artfully ripped you know they cost hundreds of dollars to look ragged. She is facing Wyatt, and they both hold cups of tea.

“Is he gone already?” I ask breathlessly.

The woman turns. She wears crimson lipstick and has amber eyes and perfect posture and is quite possibly the most beautiful human being I’ve ever seen. Wyatt, on the other hand, has gone bright red, and is pulling at his collar, which is already unbuttoned. “Anya,” he introduces, “this is Dawn. She’s working under me.”

I hear a snort, and realize Alberto is standing behind me.

Wyatt pushes up from the table. “Dawn, this is Anya Dailey. She’s footing the bill for the expedition. She came to see the coffin.”

Anya rises and slides her arm into Wyatt’s. “Among other things,” she says, smiling.

I look down at her hand, resting in the crook of his elbow. At the vintage diamond solitaire on her finger, put there by the fiancé who leads her past me and out of the room.

ABIGAIL BEAUREGARD TREMBLEY got interested in the business of death when she was visiting Indonesia the summer of her college sophomore year and ran out of money. She was hired, by the hour, to cry at funerals. On those days she would put on the only black dress in her suitcase and walk through the streets behind a funeral procession, wailing and weeping with a throng of others. “It didn’t feel dishonest,” she told me years later, when we both were hospice social workers. “For some religions, the louder your funeral is, the easier it is to get to the afterlife. Some people just have fewer mourners. Some people outlive their friends or family. Shouldn’t they get to have a good send-off, too?”

Abigail had been working at the hospice when my mother died. I became a social worker because of her. There was no one I trusted more when I had a professional question, or needed to process a client’s death. Today, when she comes into Perkatory—the coffee shop where we try to meet at least once a month just to catch up—I am already on my second pour-over and a slice of banana bread. “I know, I know…I’m late,” she says, sliding into a chair across from me and dumping her giant purse on the ground. “Professional hazard.”

I laugh. “Did you order yet?”

“Girl, I called my soy chai latte in from the road.” As if she has channeled it, the barista sets it down in front of her. “It’ll do, but what I really need is straight vodka.”

“I’ve had a few of those days myself.”

“Yeah, I heard you were with Thalia when she died. Sweet lady.”

“She was,” I agree, and we both sit in the memory for a moment. “So what’s making you wish you were drinking?”

“I have a patient whose wife couldn’t handle his death.”

“Sudden diagnosis?”

“No, believe it or not. ALS. It’s been a long time coming; reality just sort of hit her like a ton of bricks. I am not exaggerating when I say that I’ve spent more time preparing her for the inevitable than I have him. Today I go for my visit and I find them curled up together on the bed, OD’d with morphine. She dosed him and then dosed herself. Goddamn Nicholas Sparks and his goddamned Notebook.” Abigail sighs. “Here’s the kicker. She died. He didn’t. So now I have an ALS patient with no caregiver.”

“That’s terrible.”

“I know.” She looks at me over the lip of her mug. “So. What did you call the emergency powwow for?”

“I have a client who wants to make a deathbed confession.”

“Okay,” Abigail says.

“It’s one that could hurt people who are left behind.” When I have a confession like Win’s, which could rock the world of someone else in her orbit, I think hard about what should be revealed, what my responsibility is.

“I once had a thirty-eight-year-old patient tell me that he had killed his best friend,” Abigail says. “It had happened twenty-five years earlier. His friend had been drunk, on a bridge, when he slipped and fell. He thought his buddy would swim, so he didn’t jump in after him—but actually the kid had hit his head on the beam as he fell, and he drowned. My patient never told anyone, because he was afraid he’d get in trouble for underage drinking.”

“What did you do?”

“After my patient died, I traced down the kid’s family and I told them the truth. I had to, so that I could sleep at night.”

“That’s what I’m worried about,” I tell her. “Sleeping at night.”

“Is your client a serial killer or something?”

“No. Nothing illegal.” I look up at Abigail. “She wants me to do something for her. Something that might hurt her husband pretty badly after she’s gone.”

“Client trumps caregiver.”

“I know. The thing is…helping her makes me think about things I buried a long time ago.”

“Things?” Abigail says. “Or people?”

I look at her and raise my brows.

“Buried literally,” she asks, “or figuratively?”

“Figuratively,” I reply, smiling faintly.

“Dawn. What’s the first rule of hospice work?”

It’s not about you.

I pick at the banana bread, and a random thought pops into my head. Back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the United Kingdom, when someone died, a piece of bread would be placed on their chest to soak up their sins. Then, the village sin-eater was paid to consume it—taking on the guilt and the shame and the lies, leaving the soul of the deceased light enough to go to heaven.

“What are you going to do?” Abigail asks.

I take a bite of banana bread and think of Win Morse and her missing lover. I wonder what happened to sin-eaters when they died, when there was no one left to absolve them. I wonder if, with every bite, they tasted poison.

* * *

—

BEFORE WE LEAVE, Abigail asks how Brian is doing.

This morning, when he came downstairs smelling like fresh shampoo and soap, his hair still slicked back, I handed him his travel mug of coffee. This is a scene so common for the two of us that by now, it should have caused a repetitive motion injury. But today, instead of distractedly taking the mug and collecting all the things he needs to bring to the lab and leaving without saying goodbye, he stopped in front of me. “My grandmother used to say that cooking was love,” he said. “I don’t know if coffee counts as food, but still…thanks. For the cup of love.”

He blushed when he said it, and the tips of his ears went red. It was so un-Brian I almost laughed, but something held me in check. Maybe this would be the new us: appreciating what we have, instead of expecting it. “You’re welcome,” I said.

“Brian’s great,” I tell Abigail.

* * *

—