Page 18 of You'll Be the Death of Me

“Interesting,” Dell said. She did a small shimmy dance to see how she felt. If she’dpassedsometime in the night, there was a good chance there were things that needed taking care of. “Can I pee?”

“Not necessary,” he said with a bemused look on his face as he watched her dance.

She felt his eyes zip over her chest bouncing around under her nightgown. He quickly looked away.

“Wait. Why?” She stopped dancing when a piece clicked into place. One that had her suddenly terrified.

“Well, if you don’t need to eat, then there’s no need to—”

“I can’t eat?!” she shrieked, her exact worst fear coming true.

He jumped sideways.

“No, no,no!” She squeezed her face in her hands.

Dell held no strong convictions about the existence of heaven or hell, but in any iteration of an afterlife she’d imagined, therewas always an endless supply of delicious foods. “You might as well kill me now,” she sourly muttered. She cast him another glare. “Oh wait, you already did that!”

He shrunk with a cringe. “I’m really sorry,” he said like it might have been enough.

She scoffed again and looked out at the water. The fog was making way for the parade of sailboats braving the summer tide. Stripes and checkers and block colors had begun dotting the bay, albeit in a faded version of the normally vibrant patchwork.

Dell was still struggling to make sense of anything at all.

She turned back to Cole. He looked at her with his deep, dark eyes as if he were peering into her soul again, and she got the sense he’d do anything she asked. Go anywhere she wanted. Perhaps it was his remorse. Perhaps it was something else.

She had an obvious question for him, and for some reason she couldn’t identify, she found it lodged in her throat around a thick lump when she tried to ask.

“Why can I see you?” she eventually mustered. “Are you dead too?”

The look that crossed his face was hard to place. Resigned, maybe. Sad, even. He combed a hand through his mussed hair. “Yes.”

The single syllable carried an enormous weight. And it made sense, Dell realized. He wasn’t an old man, withered and wearied by a long life. If she had to guess, he was maybe a handful of years older than she was, if that. He’d obviously died young. Asking him how it had happened felt too intimate for having known him so briefly.

She decided to ask him something else.

“How’d you end up working for the— What did you call it?”

“The Afterlife Administration.”

“Right,” she said with a nod, as if they were having a totally normal conversation about totally normal things. “Can I find them on Glassdoor?”

He huffed a laugh, and Dell felt something in her hollow chest reflexively lift at the sound of it. Her own lips twitched up into a tiny grin.

“Definitely not,” he said. “And it’s a bit of a long story.”

“Well, I’d love to hear it.” She was aiming for sincerity—because surely, this was going to be a doozy of a story—but her impatience bled through.

Cole slightly winced at her tone. “Okay, so there’s this whole department within the Afterlife Administration called the Department of Accidental Deaths. Their job is to investigate deaths that happen before their time.”

“Only the good die young, right?” Dell quipped, unable to believe this conversation was real.

“So I’ve heard,” Cole said. “Anyway, the DAD—”

“Wait, it spellsdad?”

“Yes, but we call it the D-A-D.” He distinctly pronounced each letter. “The DAD’s job is to investigate the cause of each premature death and file a report. It’s very bureaucratic. Think of them like any government organization that has to file a report after an emergency or disaster.”

“FEMA for the afterlife, got it,” Dell said.