Hereafter (Shadowlands 2)

His face fell. “Do you even know where he was staying?”

I narrowed my eyes, thinking back. “He mentioned a room, but…no. He always came to my place.” Was that some kind of clue? Had he been hiding something from me?

“I can take her,” Joaquin offered.

We both tensed. For a second, I’d forgotten he was even there.

“That’s okay. I got it,” Tristan said, angling around my side as if to block Joaquin out.

We walked down the stairs together, conspicuously not touching. Near the bottom step, I glanced back up and caught Joaquin lingering at the top, watching us with a brooding expression.

Tristan held the front door open for me, and as we passed through, I saw that the door to the mayor’s office was slightly ajar. A second later, it banged shut.

“Did you see that?” I whispered.

“See what?” he asked, closing the front door behind us.

My reply caught in my throat. The fog was creeping in slowly from all sides, rolling over the grass and crowding out the flower beds at the foot of the stairs. Just like that, the mayor was forgotten.

“Someone else is being ushered,” I said flatly.

“Looks that way,” Tristan said.

I bit my tongue to keep from saying what I wanted to:

I hope they end up in the right place.

I stood in the doorway of Aaron’s room, a small, square chamber at a one-storied bayside motel called, in a very dead-on way, the Bayside Motel. Tristan hovered a few feet behind me, keeping a respectful distance while the fog continued to thicken around us. I waited for some sort of epiphany to strike me—a deep thought to occur that would put everything in perspective—but all I could think was this: Aaron was a minimalist.

There wasn’t a shred of clothing in sight. No soda cups or candy-bar wrappers or magazines. No razors or cookie crumbs or crumpled tissues. The only personal items were his canvas beach bag, which was slung over the back of a desk chair, and a hardcover copy of Tales of the City, which lay on his nightstand next to the motel’s old-school telephone, its spine perfectly aligned with the edge of the table.

“So…what do I do?” I said quietly.

“Find his suitcase, pack everything inside, and—”

“And then we take it back to the relic room,” I finished, turning to look over my shoulder.

Tristan cleared his throat. “Yes.”

“So everyone can go through it and take what they want,” I said bitterly.

“It’s not like that,” Tristan replied, shoving his hands in his pockets. “People don’t just raid the place every time someone moves on. We just leave it there, and it may or may not eventually get used.”

I nodded as the hissing fog swirled around us. “However you want to say it, it still doesn’t seem right to me.”

Tristan’s blue eyes looked pained. He glanced down, dragging his toe across the wood-plank walkway that stretched the length of the building, serving as a sort of front porch. “Rory, about last night—”

My heart thumped. I wasn’t ready to talk about this with him. Not yet. “I should get started.”

I took a deep breath and stepped over the threshold. The gray carpet inside the motel had been worn paper-thin, just like in a real motel in the real world. I wondered why they couldn’t fix up the place a little bit, considering it was the last stop before eternity. Would visitors really get that suspicious if the rooms in the motel happened to have new carpet?

“Do you want me to—?”

“No,” I told Tristan. “I’m fine.”

I looked in the small closet and found Aaron’s newish tweed suitcase, which I placed on the bed. The opening of the zipper sounded like a bomb going off in all the fog-induced silence. When I opened the top drawer of the dresser, a chill went through me that was so fierce I had to stop and force myself to breathe. There was Aaron’s rugby shirt, the one he’d worn to the Thirsty Swan with Darcy and me just a few days ago. His folded beach towel. His plain white T-shirts. I lifted them out and got a whiff of Aaron’s cologne. The scent brought tears to my eyes.

Suddenly, all I could think about was getting this over with. I placed his things in the suitcase and moved on to the next drawer, trying to ignore the pang in my heart when I touched the wetsuit from our windsurfing lessons last week. When I found the sneakers he’d worn on the beach my first night on the island—the ones that had made me feel like less of a loser for having worn mine—I had to bite back a sob. I tossed them in the bag and closed it.