Free Stranger by Megan Hart Page B

to whom it had belonged faded and became dust, too.
    I’d overseen hundreds of funerals and never once seen angels taking a soul to heaven, nor devils dragging it to hell.
    You died, they put you in a box in the ground or burned you to bits to hasten the process, and that was it. Done. Fini. There was nothing after that.

    No ever after, happily or otherwise.
    Ben blamed me for breaking us up, but I pointed the finger at the summer I worked for my dad full-time for the first time. I blamed the women who came to us shattered by the loss of their spouses, women who’d spent their lives so enmeshed with their husbands they had no idea where their men left off and they began. I blamed the wives so battered by grief they couldn’t function, and the children who cried over losing their parents.
    With Ben I’d been so tied up in the beginning of things, I hadn’t thought so much about the end. Dead was dead, there was nothing else. I wouldn’t know I was dead, so why be afraid of it? Everyone died. Everyone went.
    I wasn’t afraid of going.
    I was afraid of being left behind.
    There was no question that the dates helped me put away my job. I could have a cop, a firefighter, a teacher. I could play naughty nurse, or secretary, or anything else I wanted, limited only by imagination and my budget.
    I told Jack to meet me at the hotel I’d been using for months, a recently renovated strip motel on Harrisburg’s city limits. It had cheap rates and clean sheets, and was a good forty minutes’ drive from my home, which pretty much guaranteed I’d never accidentally bump into someone from town. Or someone’s aunt or uncle or brother, or someone I went to high school with who was home for a holiday, or someone whose brother or sister I’d gone to school with.
    I never worried about bumping into someone for whom I’d done a funeral. Not just because most families I serviced were also from the local area, and in my town the local area meant a radius of no more than ten miles. It was simpler even than that. People who met me for the first time at a service didn’t see me. They saw a funeral director, if they saw anyone at all through their own haze of emotions. Out of the very limited element in which they’d met me, I was unrecognizable.
    I’d been to that motel close to a dozen times in the past year, but the clerk behind the desk didn’t recognize me, either. It was the sort of place where the staff was paid to recognize anonymity.
    I secured the room and left the small office with the key dangling from my hand.
    Renovations aside, the Dukum Inn hadn’t switched over to key cards. I liked the weight of the heavy black plastic key ring with the room number inscribed on it in faded white. I liked the way the key fit into the lock and turned. It was tactile in a way sliding a card into a slot wasn’t.
    Jack, looking scrumptious in a battered black leather jacket, met me at the door as I opened it. Inside, the room was nothing spectacular. I couldn’t have said whether or not I’d ever been in that particular one, as a matter of fact, though after the visits I’d made you’d think I might have bothered to remember.
    Jack looked around as he shrugged out of his coat and tossed it onto the chair. “Looks like they’ve done some upgrades.”
    I closed the door and set the key on the dresser before I turned to him. “You’ve been here before?”
    He shot me a sideways grin. “Couple times. Not for a while.”
    “Is that so?” I stepped closer, reaching for the front of his shirt. “Don’t tell me. You’re used to classier accommodations?”

    His low laugh tickled me in hidden places. He let me tug him closer by the shirtfront. He had to tilt his head only a little to look down at me. The wind had blown his hair back, but even the tangles looked soft.
    “Nah.” He was smart enough not to elaborate, and I gave him credit for that.
    Jack fit his hands onto my hips. Our bodies nudged. I leaned closer to take a breath,