Tell them she was a person.”

I promised.

At the next volunteer gathering, I told everyone that Chloe had once spent a full afternoon inventing fictional diagnoses for malfunctioning office equipment.

Paige laughed so hard she had to leave the room.

The truth of a person, I learned, was often better preserved by the silly stories than by the grand ones.

PART 8

The first objection arrived before any money did.

A distant cousin of Chloe’s named Daniel, who had attended the funeral but never once visited her in the hospital, asked Miriam for copies of the beneficiary documents.