Frowning, I gave her one heavy nod. “I will,” I promised. “Of course I will. I wouldn’t leave without saying . . .”

Then, without finishing that thought, I turned on one heel and ran.

By the time I reached my first destination, both my heels and toes ached so badly that they’d almost—but not quite—gone numb; I’d been given a ride to this location for so long, I’d forgotten how long it actually took to walk here. Fortunately or not, the walk had also provided me with a lot of time to think, and now I hardly noticed the pain in my feet. Not in comparison to my brutal, panicky heartbeats.

I can do this, I told myself. I can do this.

Even so, my level of anxiety had reached new heights and I couldn’t help wishing with each step that I was back in the Mayhews’ kitchen, eating blueberry muffins and holding hands with Joshua. If nothing else, I wished that he was here again, urging me on like he’d done so many times before.

But this morning I faced my mother’s house alone.

The sight of it made me ache, like it always did. Today, the dilapidated house seemed prettier, framed by the lush, bright green of an Oklahoma spring. Even still, I stumbled slowly up the gravel driveway, wishing that I were anywhere but there.

I was still throwing the pity party, working myself up to the knock that had eluded me for so long, when the front door flung open and my mother came charging out of house. She was carrying an overstuffed trash bag, and for a moment, all I could think was, Guess it’s trash day.

I snapped back to reality in time to realize that the trash bag blocked my mother’s view of me. I was still safe, if I acted quickly. So I allowed the current of invisibility to run over my skin, just in time to see my mother shift the trash bag and casually glance in my direction. I’d gone invisible by the time the bag slipped from her hands, clattering to the ground and spilling its contents all over the porch. But by then, the damage was done.

Although I knew she couldn’t see me now, I didn’t twitch a single muscle. She didn’t move either, even as several items from her trash rattled noisily across her porch. When an empty glass bottle rolled off the edge and shattered against a large chunk of rock on her lawn, both of us jumped . . . and both of us shrieked.

I slapped my hand over my mouth, but it was too late: if my mother thought, for even a second, that I didn’t really exist, I’d just proved her wrong. But even after that slipup, we both remained silent, motionless, for an awfully long time.

Finally, my mother stirred.

“Wherever you went,” she called, “you can come out now.”

I wavered, still so unsure of what to do or say next. Then, acting mostly on instinct, I ran the current back over my skin. At that moment, I was fully visible to her—no hat or sunglasses to mask my face, no black dress to hide my body. Just me, in clothes and last night’s makeup. Looking, for the most part, exactly like I did over a decade ago, on the night that I died.

If I frightened my mother, that reaction certainly didn’t show on her face. In fact, her expression remained the same. She continued to frown thoughtfully, clearly taking in each element of my appearance: the pale, drawn face; the abused ballet flats; the designer clothes, now dusty from my walk. Then, inexplicably, she smiled.

“Looks like you’ve had quite a night.”

I blinked back, stunned by how calm she sounded.

“Do you want to come up onto the porch, and talk?” she offered.

Still pretty befuddled, I nodded and began to take slow, unsteady steps toward the house. I stopped before climbing the porch steps and looked up at her.

“How did you know?” I asked softly.

I couldn’t be sure, but I thought she flinched slightly—maybe at the sound of my voice. Of course, she’d heard me speak after Serena’s funeral, but that was when I could have been someone else. Someone who wasn’t her long-dead daughter.

Even if she had flinched, I couldn’t see any fear in her second smile. All I could see was a sweet, crushing mix of sadness and love.

“Don’t you think,” she asked kindly, “that I would recognize my own daughter’s hands?”

“What . . . what do you mean?” I whispered.

Still smiling, my mother shook her head. “Your hands—when you reached out to put that iris on Serena’s casket, I saw your hands. And I knew that it was you; that it had to be you.”

“Oh.”

My one syllable sounded flat and uninspired, but that was the best I could do right then. Without another word, I used a column to pull myself onto the porch—mostly so that I could avoid the steps, to which my mother stood too near. For some reason, I didn’t want to come too close to her. Maybe because I didn’t want to find out what would happen if she tried to touch me.

“Do you . . . want to sit down?” my mother asked, gesturing to the two plastic lawn chairs that occupied the far corner of the porch.

“Sure,” I answered roughly, and then followed her slowly to the chairs, keeping my distance the entire way. I waited for her to sit first before I took my seat, using one hand to sweep the dust off my jeans.

We sat there for another long moment, staring warily at each other. She looked pretty in the early-morning light. Her dark hair, so close in color to mine, lay loose on her shoulders, free of its usual ponytail.

“So,” she began, after awkwardly clearing her throat. “Maybe we should start with the basics?”

“Okay. Okay, sure.”

“First things first, then. Do you . . . you know about Daddy?” she asked haltingly.

And with that question, I finally burst into tears. A flood of them, actually. They poured out of my eyes, stinging my skin and washing away any remnants of makeup I still wore.

To my surprise, it felt good to cry, especially on a day like today. Even more surprising, my mother started to cry as well. I didn’t try to stop her. Instead, we sat there crying for nearly an hour, mourning my father together.

Not for the first time, it struck me that although my mother had suffered my death with someone who shared her burden—my father—she’d faced his death alone. Now, she could finally cry with someone who missed him just as much as she did. And strangely, I felt a weird kind of relief that I could share this grief with her.

After a while, however, my mother and I had both shed enough tears. So we began to talk—a decade’s worth of talking, in fact. Initially, the conversation consisted of her asking questions, and me answering them. What happened after I died? Did I know where Daddy was? Did it hurt, to die? I answered her questions as honestly as I could, although some almost caused me more pain than I could stand. Eventually, the conversation turned to her, and her life since my father and I left her. And eventually, the conversation turned to that night.

She asked and, because she was my mother—because I loved her—I told her everything.

I told her about Joshua and how I felt about him. I told her about the friends I’d made since my death, including the one I’d lost. I told her about all the things that the demons had done to me, and all that they promised to do. And then I told her about the light and how my father waited for me there; about Melissa’s offer to join him straightaway, before the demons had a chance to destroy my soul forever.

Finally, I described my plan—a plan that I hadn’t fully shared with anyone until now. When I got to the part that she might play in it, I hesitated, just for a moment. Then I spilled my idea in one breath, running each sentence into the other so that the concept wouldn’t sound quite so crazy, or offensive.

Even as I spoke, I questioned whether or not this was the right move. After all, I’d thought about this aspect of my plan since Ruth died, and I still hated it with every cell in my body. Yet I also knew it was the only way I could convince the demons to do what I needed them to. I’d run through the list of candidates for this particular job so many times in my head. Jillian, Scott, Felix, Annabel—I had tried and rejected each one. As much as I fought it, I knew that no one worked quite as well as my mother.