behind the camera - fake dating sports romance (wlw)

Chapter Thirty-Eight

HARPER

I don't remember much about the hours after.

People keep handing me papers. Slipping forms across the counter. Repeating words like documentation, certified copy, next of kin. I nod, mostly. Sometimes I blink. Sometimes I sign things. I don't read them. I don't ask questions. I'm afraid if I open my mouth, I'll never stop screaming.

There's a woman behind a desk—one of the hospital social workers, maybe. I can't remember her name. She wears a soft pink blouse and a pearl necklace that keeps catching on the collar. She keeps using the word "process." As in part of the process, as in grieving is a process, as in we'll process the paperwork today.

I want to ask her if she's ever had to box up a life she wasn't ready to lose.

Millie's sitting beside me. Her knee keeps brushing mine, gently. Deliberately. A tether. I haven't looked at her since we walked in, but I know she's the reason I haven't curled up under the receptionist's desk and stayed there. She keeps declining calls on my behalf. She gently pulls away the clipboard when I freeze halfway through signing something. She tells the funeral home that it's going to be very small, just four of us, and no, we won't need a venue. We don't know anyone in Florida. We don't have family. My mom is all I had.

It takes hours. And I don't say a single word. Not until we're back in the hotel room and the door shuts behind us with a soft, final click.

"I hated the way they said her name," I murmur.

Millie turns to me like she's surprised I've spoken at all. "What do you mean?"

I sit down on the edge of the bed, knees shaking. "Like she was a task. A file in a cabinet. Like it was over." My throat burns. "She's not over. She's my mom."

Millie doesn't say anything. Just walks over slowly and kneels in front of me, hands resting on my thighs like she's steadying me there. I can't look her in the eye. If I do, I'll start crying again, and I'm so, so tired of crying.

"I know," she whispers. "She's not over."

The funeral is the next morning.

They bring her in through a side door—quiet, efficient, like she's a delivery. Like she's just another item on the schedule. The casket is plain. Unadorned. Soft wood, matte finish, no gold or silver trim. It doesn't look like it belongs to someone who smiled like she did. It looks like it was made to disappear.

We're in a small, sterile room tucked behind the cremation center. No pews. No stained glass. No soft organ music humming beneath the weight of mourning. Just blue chairs in four neat rows, gray carpet that smells faintly of bleach, and artificial eucalyptus curling through the vents like it's supposed to ease something it has no right to touch.

There are only four of us. Me. Millie. Luna. Mia. That's it.

There's no slideshow. No hymns. No pastor standing up front saying her name with practiced reverence. No table of photographs. No old neighbors or distant relatives hugging me too tightly and telling me she's in a better place.

Just a box.

Just my mother in a box.

The funeral director gives a tight nod and disappears. The silence that settles over the room after that is unbearable. I want to scream into it. Tear it in half. Make someone say something.

But I can't speak.

I wrote something last night. Or tried to. In the hotel bathroom, crouched on the cold tile because I didn't want to wake Millie. I used a complimentary notepad and the pen from the nightstand. I wrote through tears I didn't wipe away. It's barely a paragraph. But it felt like something. A scrap of love I could leave with her.