I set the county notice down on the counter.

“A death certificate,” I repeated.

Evan nodded once.

“With your name on it.”

For some reason, that was the moment I thought about my father.

He’d been a practical man from Toledo who taught me how to change a tire, balance a checkbook, and never sign a document without reading the second page. He’d died six years earlier, and even then—even at the funeral home with my mother crying into tissues beside me—the paperwork had felt brutally real.