1. The Sealed Lid

Five days ago my father was laughing at my terrible parking. Today he's in a box, and somebody sealed the box wrong.

I don't mean symbolically. I mean the funeral home used six extra screws on a lid that only needs four. I counted them twice while Mom cried into Aunt Priya's shoulder near the flower arrangements, because counting screws was easier than looking at the framed photo of my dad grinning on a hiking trail, sunlight in his hair, six days ago, alive.

"Micah, come sit," my mother, Adaline, says, patting the chair beside her. Her voice cracks on my name like it always does now.

I don't sit. I've been standing near the casket for ten minutes, phone in my pocket, heart doing something wrong and fast.

"Why is it closed?" I ask. Not the first time today.

"Because your uncle arranged it that way," Mom says. "He said it was — kinder. After the accident, his face wasn't —"

"He didn't have an accident. He collapsed in the kitchen."

My uncle Roman appears the way he always does, like he's been listening from just out of frame. He's my father's older brother, same jaw, harder eyes. "Micah. Not today."

"I want to see him."

"You don't," Roman says, low, final, the tone he uses on clients at his firm. "Trust me. You don't want that as your last memory."

Something in the way he says *trust me* makes my skin crawl, and I don't know why yet.

I drift toward the casket while the adults argue logistics — cars, flowers, the burial slot at eleven tomorrow, so fast, everything so fast, five days from collapse to grave — and I rest my hand flat on the mahogany lid, over where his chest would be.

It's warm.

Not from sunlight. There's no sun on this side of the room. I press my palm harder, telling myself it's the fabric lining, the funeral home's heating vents, anything.

Then I hear Roman's voice drop to a whisper behind me, talking to the funeral director near the door — a whisper meant for no one, except I catch three words of it clearly.

"...before anyone opens it."