Chapter 2 — Ten Years Back
601 Words
Boston woke under a low ceiling of fog, the kind that made the city sound softer than it was.
Ethan Cross stood at his window, watching the morning form itself—delivery vans, the thin cry of gulls, a man arguing with a parking meter like it could change its mind. His reflection in the glass looked unfamiliar: younger, sharper, eyes carrying the kind of alertness he hadn’t felt since before he died.
He opened his palm. Steady. No bullet wound, no scar. Yet every few breaths, his chest seemed to remember the weight of them.
The alarm clock read 6:00 a.m. He had work.
The Medical Examiner’s building was smaller in this version of the city—less technology, more bureaucracy. A guard at the door waved him through without looking up from his crossword.
Inside, the morgue’s air hit him: formaldehyde, bleach, and the faint hum of fluorescent light. For a moment, he just stood there, letting the sound fill the space inside him that hadn’t caught up with being alive again.
The first body of the day waited under a white sheet. Male, mid-thirties, pulled from the river. No ID, no obvious trauma. Only a faint oval mark above the heart, so subtle it could have been imagination.
He noted it anyway. “Precordial discoloration,” he murmured into his recorder, “unclear origin.”
He worked the way some people prayed—quietly, precisely. The scalpel glided, his hands as disciplined as ever, but every movement felt wrong, like the rhythm of the world had shifted half a beat.
The organs were too pale. The blood too still. He touched a droplet with a gloved finger; it caught the light and shimmered faintly before dulling to red.
That shimmer lived somewhere between science and superstition. He filed it away for later.
A knock on the door broke the silence.
“Dr. Cross?”
The voice was new—female, confident, slightly roughened by long nights and too much coffee.
He turned. A woman in plain clothes stood by the doorway, badge clipped to her belt. Dark hair pulled back, eyes sharp enough to measure truth.
“Detective Luna Hayes,” she said. “You’re the one doing the Fort Point autopsy?”
“I was,” he replied, pulling off his gloves. “You’re early.”
“I don’t like waiting on reports.”
“I don’t like writing them,” he said.
That earned him a quick half-smile. “Then we’ll get along fine.”
She walked closer, glancing at the open file. “Cause of death?”
“Still determining. Drowning’s too clean. There’s no water in the lungs.”
She frowned. “You sound sure.”
“I’m a fan of evidence.”
Her eyes lingered on him a second longer than protocol allowed. “You don’t look like most coroners.”
He returned her look, calm and unreadable. “Neither do you look like most detectives.”
The air between them thickened, charged but unspoken.
Finally, she nodded toward the body. “Let me know what you find.”
“I always do,” he said, though the truth was, he rarely did.
When she left, the scent of her—coffee, rain, and something faintly electric—stayed behind.
Ethan looked back at the body, then at his own reflection in the glass cabinet. His eyes caught the light for half a second, glowing faintly gold.
He exhaled. “Not yet,” he said quietly.
Outside, sirens began their morning chorus.Inside, the dead waited, and the living pretended not to be haunted.
- Writer
