Not in a cemetery this time but in a hospital, in the light, in a room with a heart monitor and clean sheets, with a doctor and a smile and a small tray.

The plan had not ended when we climbed out of the ground; it had simply followed us up into the world and put on a white coat.

If Detective Vance had not been sitting in that chair — if he had stepped out for coffee, if he had not read the timeline closely enough to know the toxicology report was still open — the man with the syringe would have leaned over my line and finished, in thirty quiet seconds, the thing the grave had failed to do, and no one would ever have questioned it, because who questions a chief medical examiner attending a patient.

I understood then that we were not safe simply because we were alive.