6. The Screwdriver

I walk back into the church like my legs belong to someone else.

Never embalmed. Warm six hours after death. A lab report drawn from a body an hour after the phone call. My uncle whispering about insurance payouts and "before anyone opens it" like a man racing a clock only he can see.

The pews are full. My mother sits in the front row in black, her hand already reaching for mine as I pass, expecting me to sit, to be her son today and nothing else. I almost do it. I almost fold into that chair and let the service happen to me the way everything's happened to me for five days straight.

Instead I stop at the casket.

"Micah." Roman's voice, sharp, from two rows back. "Sit down."

I don't. My phone is already out, already recording, already streaming to the forty-some people watching from home who think they're about to witness a burial. My hands find the edge of the lid where Mr. Delacroix showed me the clasp releases, and I realize with a strange, distant calm that I never actually saw anyone screw this thing shut. I only heard about screws. Roman said *closed*. Roman said *sealed*. Roman, who needed a payout before an inquiry could freeze it.

"What are you doing?" someone gasps behind me.

"Micah, stop —" my mother's voice, breaking.

I don't stop. My fingers are shaking so hard I fumble the first clasp twice before it gives.

"Somebody get him away from there," Roman says, and now he's moving, fast, down the aisle toward me, and there's real fear on his face for the first time all week — not grief, fear — and that fear tells me everything I need to know about what he's afraid I'll find.

The second clasp releases with a click that sounds enormous in the silent church.

I put both hands flat on the lid, my father's face six inches beneath my palms, forty people holding their breath behind me, my phone still streaming live to my aunt eight thousand miles away, and I push the lid open.