“Come with me for a minute.” “No.” “You need to rest, baby.” She did not look away from her father’s face.

“Daddy isn’t resting either,” she said.

And a cold shiver moved down my spine, because it was such a strange thing for a child to say, and she said it with such flat, adult certainty, as though it were a plain observation and not a hope.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

She did not answer.

And as I stood there, unsettled, a detail I had not consciously registered swam up into my mind, and then another, and they began, quietly, to arrange themselves into a shape I did not like.

Mark had not been prepared by a standard funeral home, the way it normally happens.