Page 49 of The Next Person You Meet in Heaven

She shows Beatrice her scarred hand.

“Does it still bother you?”

“When it’s cold. And if I don’t move the fingers—”

“I meant whatever happened.”

“Well, that’s the thing. I don’t know what happened. I blocked it out.”

Beatrice thinks for a moment. “There are people you can talk to about that.”

“Yeah, but...” Annie bites her lip.

“What?”

“There’s something else.”

“What?”

“I think someone got killed.”

Beatrice’s eyes widen. “Well,that’sa story.”

“If I talked to someone—”

“You’re afraid of what you’d find out?”

Annie nods.

“Honey, that may be why your head blocked it in the first place.”

Beatrice puts a palm over Annie’s bad hand.

“When you’re ready to remember, you’ll remember.”

Annie pushes up a smile. But she wonders if Beatrice will think less of her now, a woman with a secret she won’t let herself see.

The Fourth Person Annie Meets in Heaven

“It ain’treallymy grave.”

Annie spun to see a squat old man standing in the sand, arms folded like flippers across his chest. He wore a pale brown uniform and a linen cap. The man from her wedding. The one she’d kept seeing.

“I did die here,” he said. “Well, over there, in the park. The guys I worked with made that marker for my birthday. I used to call ’em ‘brickheads,’ so they gave me that brick. Buncha jokers.”

He shrugged his thick shoulders. His hair was white, his ears were large, and his nose was flat with a crooked bridge, as if it had been broken more than once. The lines by his eyes cracked down to whiskered cheeks. They lifted now into a friendly grin.

“Hey, kiddo,” he said, as if he knew her.

“You were at my wedding,” Annie whispered. “You waved at me.”

“I was kinda hoping you’d be older.”

“Older?”

“You’re awful young to be here.”

“There was an accident.”