Chapter 4

"The funeral home. Alice was spotted on the street right next to the funeral home last night."

Mason's text came in at 2:00 am, but I didn't see it until daybreak.

"It's the same one where your dad's service was held. She was coming out of the back exit carrying a bag. I just happened to drive past and catch her."

Dad had been gone for a long time. Why was Alice still going back there?

I took the morning off and drove straight over.

The back exit of the funeral home opened up into a small courtyard converted from an old warehouse.

A middle-aged man wearing grey coveralls stopped me. "Sir, this area is closed to the public. Who are you looking for?"

"I wanted to ask if a woman came by last night. Early 30s, hair in a ponytail."

"How are you related to her?"

"I'm her husband," I replied.

The man's posture relaxed, and a look of unnamable sympathy surfaced in his eyes.

"Ms. Carr, right? She comes here every month."

Every month?

"To do what?" I asked.

"To swap out the cloths." The man led me around the warehouse to a row of metal lockers.

The lockers were covered in labels. He pulled open a drawer in the third row, on the far left.

Inside was a small wooden box. Taped to the lid was a slip of white paper with two words written on it—Stanley Allen.

That was Dad's name.

"It's not ashes. You guys took the ashes home back then," the man said, lifting the lid. "This is just something Ms. Carr registered for private storage."

Inside was a small stack of old fabric strips, folded neatly into perfect squares.

The scent of diesel hit me instantly—thick, pungent, and familiar.

"These cloths are…"

"Ms. Carr said they were your father's personal clothes from before he passed. She cuts them into small pieces and comes by to rotate them out.

"She takes the ones where the scent has faded and replaces them with a fresh batch. We keep them in a climate-controlled locker to preserve the smell," the man explained.

I asked, "What does she do with the ones she takes?"

"I'm not entirely sure. She mentioned it in passing last time, saying she needed to place them by someone's side, and that the scent couldn't stop."

The pillow.

That was where the fabric inside the pillow came from.

She wasn't sniffing some imaginary, phantom scent.

She was sniffing the actual, physical remnants of Dad—the blend of diesel oil and tobacco that still clung to those rags.

After leaving the funeral home, I sat in my car, unable to turn the key. All ten of my fingers were shaking violently.

I called Mom six times with no response.

On the seventh try, she finally picked up.

"Leon—"

"Mom, I went to the funeral home. I saw them—the scraps of Dad's clothes. Alice goes there every month to swap them out. That's what's sewn inside the pillow. Tell me what's going on right now."

A sharp sob came from the other end of the line.

After a long silence, Mom finally spoke. "Before your dad passed—"

Suddenly, the neighbor's voice came through in the background.

Mom mumbled a quick reply, then dropped her voice low into the receiver.

"Leon, I can't explain this over the phone. Come back home. There's something you need to see."

"Tell me now," I said.

"Just come home. Some things can't be explained unless we're face-to-face."

With that, she hung up.

…

It was a three-hour drive. The sky was pitch black by the time I pulled into our hometown.

The hallway lights in our dated apartment building were half-broken.

When Mom opened the door, she looked so terribly thin that it took me a second to recognize her. Her hair had turned a shade whiter.

She ushered me inside and set a glass of water on the table. Then, she hauled a cardboard box out from the bedroom.

"During your dad's final week, he wasn't lucid very often."

She opened the box. Inside were Dad's old belongings—his reading glasses, his denture case, and a 20-year-old faux-leather wallet.

"One afternoon, he suddenly had a burst of energy. He asked Alice to help him sit up. He wanted a pen and paper."

"To write what?" I asked.

She pulled a folded piece of paper from a hidden compartment in the wallet. The edges were completely frayed from use.

"His hands were shaking so badly that he could barely hold the pen. He spent the whole afternoon writing, but he only managed half a page."

I took it from her.

The paper had already turned yellow.

Dad's handwriting had always been terrible, but the writing on this page was agonizing—crooked and jagged like a child's. The strokes clearly showed his hand trembling as he forced the pen across the paper.

The first word at the top was written in the largest font—"Leon".

The ink beneath it varied in depth, and a few spots in the middle had been blurred by water stains.

I made out the very first sentence. "I never said a kind word to you in my entire life."

The page cut off right there.

It wasn't the end of the letter. It had been violently torn in half. The bottom section was gone.

"Where's the rest?"

Mom lowered her head. "Alice has it."

"Why?"

"She said that… the time isn't right."

"What does that even mean? Dad wrote me this letter. What right does she have to keep it?"

Mom didn't answer. She simply raised her head and looked at me. There was a look in her eyes I had never seen before.

It wasn't pity. It was much heavier than pity.

It was guilt.

"Mom, what exactly did Dad say to Alice before he died?"

She picked up the glass of water, shielding half her face. Her voice was muffled against the glass as she said, "Go ask her yourself. Some things… you'll have to hear straight from her."