Chapter One: The White Hall
The flowers arrived before the mourners did.
Lilies, white carnations, a single wreath of pale roses — they lined the walls of Greenfield Funeral Home like silent sentinels. By ten in the morning, every chair in the hall was filled. People stood along the back wall, shoulders touching, no one quite willing to look directly at the open coffin that sat at the front of the room beneath a soft, relentless light.
Inside it lay Maya Calloway. Twenty-four years old. Dark hair arranged carefully around her still face. Hands folded on her chest, fingers interlaced, a small silver ring still on her index finger — the one her mother had given her on her eighteenth birthday, the one she never took off.
She looked, to everyone who approached, as though she were simply sleeping.
Her name had been whispered in hospital corridors for five days before the end came. A rare viral encephalitis — a brain inflammation of unknown origin — had taken hold of her with terrifying speed. On Tuesday she had complained of a headache and chills. By Thursday she couldn’t recognize her own mother’s voice. By Saturday morning, the attending physician, Dr. Harmon, had walked into the waiting room with his eyes cast downward and his hands clasped in front of him, and the family had known before he even opened his mouth.
Resuscitation was unsuccessful. Time of death: 6:42 a.m.
The death certificate was signed. The funeral home was called. And now here they all were — aunts and uncles, childhood friends, coworkers from the bookshop where Maya had worked, neighbors who had watched her grow up — gathered in this white room that smelled of lilies and quiet grief.
