She opened her mouth and then clamped it shut. How dare he ask her that? “We don’t talk about those things,” she said. In the waiting room, you didn’t talk about what had happened before. “Once you’re dead, and a ghost, it doesn’t matter how you got here.”
He didn’t flinch. He kept staring at her. Then, back still braced against the wall, he slid down into a squat, comfortable, as if he intended to be there for a while. “If you tell me how you died, maybe you can help me.”
Help him how, why, with what? Ghosts didn’t help ghosts, but oh, that’s right, he wasn’t a ghost. Damn. This wasn’t the way her job worked.
Glaring at him, she chewed her lower lip, chomping on it like it was gum, but it didn’t help. She could feel her anger slipping. His eyes looked sad and beautiful and perfect like the morning sky on a summer day.
Her arms relaxed at her side, but then she folded them across her chest, refusing to let go of her last bit of stubbornness. “Why do you want to know how I died?”
“I said it might help me find the truth, help me believe if I’m a ghost or not,” he said quietly.