The Reaper's Mistake

Chapter Four

I don't see him for two days after the diner, and somehow the absence is worse than the presence was.

I catch myself watching doorways. Waiting for that particular stillness to drop over a room the way it did outside the bakery, that change in the air I still don't have a real name for. It doesn't come. I go to work, I come home, I eat cereal standing over the sink because I'm too tired to sit down for it, and nothing happens at all, and somehow that nothing feels like it's holding its breath.

Priya notices before I say a word about it, because Priya notices everything, which is either the best or the worst quality in a roommate depending on the week.

"You keep doing the thing," she says on the second night, cross-legged on the other end of the couch with a bowl of popcorn balanced on her knee, eyes on me instead of the movie neither of us is actually watching.

"What thing?"

"The thing where you look at the window like it personally owes you money." She throws a piece of popcorn at me, which I catch out of reflex and don't eat. "You've been doing it since the accident. You okay? Like actually okay, not fine-okay."

I want to tell her. The urge sits heavy in my chest for a second, the specific ache of wanting someone to believe you when you're not sure you believe yourself. But there isn't a version of "the man who crashed into my rain that night is Death, and he's stuck to me until he fixes a filing error" that doesn't end with her driving me straight back to the hospital, so I swallow it down instead.

"Just shaken up still," I say. "It was a bad crash, Priya. I think I'm allowed a little weird."

She studies me a beat too long, the way she does when she's deciding whether to push, and then lets it go, because that's the deal we've had since college. She doesn't push, and I don't lie about the big things, only the ones I have to.

He shows up on the third day, and it's so ordinary that it takes me a full minute to understand what I'm looking at.

I'm at the little grocery store two blocks from the apartment, the one with the flickering light over the produce section that's been broken since before I moved in, picking through a bin of apples that all look slightly disappointing, and when I glance up he's standing at the end of the aisle. Not doing anything. Not watching me with that unnerving stillness from before. Just standing there, in the same severe black, looking at a shelf of canned soup like he's never seen one before in his life, which, I realize with a strange lurch, might genuinely be true.

I walk over before I can think better of it.

"You're in a grocery store," I say.

He turns his head toward me, and there's something almost caught about the movement, like he wasn't fully expecting to be spoken to. "I am."

"Reapers grocery shop?"

"I don't require food." He says it the way he says everything, flat, precise, entirely without embarrassment, though something about the set of his jaw suggests he's aware of how strange the whole scene must look. "I am observing you. You are in a grocery store. Therefore I am in a grocery store."

"You could observe me from outside. You don't have to be personally offended by canned soup while you do it."

The corner of his mouth does the thing again, that faint architectural almost-smile that never quite finishes arriving. "I wasn't aware soup was capable of offending anyone."

"That's the least reassuring thing you've said to me, and you told me you're Death two days ago."

He doesn't answer that, but he falls into step beside me anyway when I go back to the apples, an unhurried, silent presence at my shoulder that should feel invasive and somehow, infuriatingly, doesn't. I pick through the bin. He watches me do it with the focus of a man studying a foreign ritual.

"You could just say hello," I tell him, holding up an apple, turning it over, deciding against it. "Like a normal person. Instead of just appearing in aisles."

"I'm not a normal person."

"I noticed." I move down to the oranges. He moves with me. "But you could still try. It's not that hard. People do it constantly. Even bad people manage hello."

He's quiet for a moment, long enough that I think he's decided not to answer at all, and then, low, almost testing the shape of the word before he commits to it fully: "Hello, Clara."

It shouldn't do anything to me. It's two syllables. It's the bare minimum of human interaction, offered by something that has told me outright it isn't human at all. But there's something in the careful, deliberate way he says it, like a man trying on a language he's never had a reason to speak before, and it catches somewhere under my ribs that I don't examine too closely while we're still standing in the produce section.

"Better," I say instead, because it's easier than the alternative. "See? Not so hard."

He doesn't smile, not really, but something in his face eases by a fraction, some tension I hadn't clocked as tension until it's gone. And for one strange, quiet minute, in a badly lit grocery store aisle with a flickering light and a man who tells the dead where to go, it almost feels like something close to normal.