Page 135 of The Final Cut

She looks at my hair first.

Then my eyes.

Then my mouth, like she is reading a face she has carried in the dark for longer than I have been alive enough to hate her.

Her own mouth trembles, and her fingertips brush her lips.

“Reva?”

My name does not sound like a question. It sounds like fifteen years of being locked behind her teeth.

I stare at her, the chapel tilting beneath me.

No.

My mind says it once, without sound.

No.

Because I have seen pictures. Haven’t I? Old ones. Burned edges in memory. A face behind smoke. A sheet on a floor. My mother was dead. My mother died in that house. My mother was one of the shapes beneath white fabric while a police officer carried me past and told me not to look.

The woman takes one step toward me.

I step back so fast my hip bangs painfully into the pew.

She stops at once.

“Don’t,” I say.

The word scrapes out of me, small and vicious. Her eyes fill, but she does not reach again.

She lifts one hand toward her mouth, then drops it, as if even covering her own grief feels like taking too much. “I’m sorry.”

No. Those words are worse. Sorry belongs to late bills and missed calls and stepping on someone’s foot in a grocery aisle. It does not belong in the space between a dead mother and a daughter standing in a hospital chapel with her heart trying to claw through her ribs.

“How do you know my name?”

She swallows, the fingers of one hand circling the wrist of the other absently, and that’s when the room truly starts coming apart.

“Wh-what…why are you doing that?” I point to her hand.

She jerks her hand away. “It’s just a habit.”

The same dark hair. The same shape around the eyes. Older, thinner, grief-carved, but there. There. In the angle of her cheek, in the soft curve of her mouth, in the way her left brow lifts higher than the right because mine does that too when I am trying not to cry.

I press both hands against the back of the pew to keep from reaching for my own wrist. Just a habit.

Stupid.

Stupid.

I ask her again. “How do you know my name?”

The woman’s voice shakes. “Because I gave it to you.”

DELIA

AGE 22