That is not what happened the day we buried Daniel Mercer.
The chapel smelled like lilies so thick and sweet they almost made me dizzy, and the air carried that muffled tension that comes when too many people are trying to behave properly while their emotions are fraying underneath. Outside, downtown Chicago moved on like nothing had happened — taxis honking, wind rattling through steel towers — but inside the chapel time felt slow and heavy, like it had been poured into molasses.
Daniel lay inside the polished mahogany casket near the altar, his expression composed in that unsettling way morticians arrange the dead, where the person looks peaceful but also unmistakably gone. I stood beside him longer than anyone else had, staring down at the face I had kissed goodbye the morning before the accident that took him away from me.
My hand rested on my stomach without me thinking about it.
Eight weeks.
Eight weeks pregnant with a child Daniel would never know about.
The thought sat inside my chest like something fragile made of glass, and I had told no one — not Daniel’s family, not my coworkers, not even my closest friend — because everything had happened so quickly that I hadn’t yet found the right moment, and then suddenly there was no moment left.
I remember thinking that grief felt physical, like someone had poured cement into my ribs, and yet beneath that grief another emotion had been quietly forming all morning — something colder, sharper, like a blade sliding into place.
Because I knew Daniel’s family.
