“You can grieve for what you never had, you know,” Elliot murmured, and his voice was so tender I couldn’t help but look up.
And all I found in the fractured crystal of his hazel eyes was love.
7
Elliot Crane
This guy smells funny.
I barely managedto suppress the snort of surprise that wanted to come out when I read the text. Elliot was sitting next to me, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. He’d been fiddling with his phone, and I guess he’d decided to send me a message.
We were at the Augusta County Morgue, and the coroner’s assistant was droning through the procedure for claiming my mother’s body. I’d been listening just enough to get the important parts and sign the papers he shoved at me, but Elliot clearly had been thinking about other things.
The coroner’s assistant, a pale, skinny guy with lank brown hair and slightly tinted glasses who looked to be somewhere in his thirties or forties—around my age or Elliot’s—was explaining how once I’d claimed my mother’s body, they would only hold it for another twenty-four hours, so I’d need to get a funeral home to come and pick her up.
Elliot was right.
The guy did smell funny.
Kind of like boiled cabbage and raw fish.
The phone on the desk started to ring.
The assistant coroner ignored it, continuing to talk me through the very short list of mortuary options in Staunton, although apparently some of the places in Charlottesville would come all the way here if you got a full package from them. Somewhere, I had Humbolt’s recommendation, although I couldn’t remember at the moment if he’d written it down or sent it in email or a text.
The phone rang again.
He ignored it, again.
Then his office door opened, and the woman from the reception desk stuck her head in. “Dr. Fisher?”
His expression was annoyed. “I am busy,” he told her.
“You really need to take this call,” she said.
“Denise—”
“Youreallyneed to,” she insisted, and I looked at her, surprised to scent fear. Elliot also sat up straighter, the lines of his face tight.
Denise looked at us, then at the phone, and it was clear she thought that not only did he need to take the call, but we shouldn’t be in the room when he did.
Fisher sighed audibly. “If you could excuse me..?”
“Sure,” I said, standing. Elliot hesitated, but then he followed me out into the hallway. I kept going, walking out into the summer heat.
“Are we leaving?” he asked, once we’d gotten outside and I’d pulled off the loose-fitting surgical mask that hadn’t actually done all that much to obscure the smells in the coroner’s office.
“I’d like to stop smelling preservatives and ammonia,” I answered. “While I call these funeral homes.”
Elliot shifted his weight, then pulled his sunglasses out of his shirt pocket and put them on his face. The mirrored gold lensesobscured his dark hazel eyes and the slight darkening of the skin under them from a mostly-sleepless night.
My fault for having nightmares and then not being able to let myself fall back into sleep. He didn’t complain, though. Just bought us both large iced coffees and breakfast.
Humbolt had texted to let me know I needed to go claim my mother’s body. Elliot had insisted on going with me, not that I had any objections. I’d felt exposed and vulnerable while he’d gone out to get breakfast, so I was glad he’d come with me.
“Do you want me to do it?” he asked.
I looked over at him. “Uh.”
