I grin. “Her inheritance. You have a will, and it leaves everything to her. Is that right?”
“It isn’t much,” she says. “The house, my car. A bit of money at First Peachville Bank. The rest will come from my life insurance.”
Charlie told me her Grams once did makeup for the stars. It must have netted her a good income for her to have paid off the house and car and still have enough for retirement.
“Grams, I need you to listen,” I say. “I’m going to ask you to do something that you may not want to do.”
She looks at me expectantly, her thin lips parted. “Where’s Charlie?”
I eye the medicine bottles near her bed again. “I know this is hard, but it’s really important that you try and focus. I don’t want to have to press when you’re not well, but…” I shake my head. “Have you ever thought about what will happen after…after this is over?”
She works her jaw.
“You may not think there’s an afterlife. But I do. In fact, I know there’s an afterlife. For you, for me—for all of us.” I fill my lungs and plunge forward. “I need you to believe what I’m telling you. I need you to believe it so much that you’re willing to prove it.”
She looks at me, her eyes narrowed. Finally, after I’ve convinced myself she won’t answer, she asks, “How would I prove it?”
I smile. I can’t help it. This may not work, but at least she’s not tossing me out. “You say you have a will, and that it leaves everything to Charlie.”
Grams nods, but I can tell she’s getting tired. Her eyelids droop, and her mouth falls open wider.
“Why did you leave everything to her?” I ask.
Grams closes her eyes. “Because she’s my Charlie.”
“Because you love her,” I say.
Grams smiles.
“What if I asked you to give it to someone else?”
Her eyes pop back open, alert this time. She narrows those blue-grays at me. “Why are you saying this?”
My pulse pounds, but I push on, hoping she’ll continue to listen. “You’re leaving everything to Charlie because she’s given something back to you—love, companionship. Whatever. But if you were to leave everything to someone you’d never met? Well, that would be charitable in a big way. Huge.”
Maybe enough to tip the scales during Judgment.
“You’re trying to take my money,” she accuses, pulling back in the bed. Fear rushes through me that I’m losing her. I want to show her my ability to shadow, or maybe my cuff, something that will convince her of who I am and what I’m trying to accomplish. But I can’t. Because then it wouldn’t be the same. She has to do this on her own—on faith.
I ignore her accusation. “If you believe in an afterlife, if you want to spend an eternity where Charlie can eventually join you, then do this. Believe when I tell you there’s life after this one, and that you can live it well. Do this, Grams. Please.”
She looks at me like I’m crazy, and my insides tie themselves into knots as I await her response.
When she turns away from me and faces the window, I know I’ve lost her.
But then.
Then she says something—
“What would you have me do?”
My heart threatens to break open, but I seal it tight. Don’t let anything in or anything out, I remind myself. Then it won’t hurt.
I glance around the room and find paper and pen. “I’m going to tell you what I’m writing, okay?” I tell her. She doesn’t say anything, so I start writing and reading aloud. “This is the last will and testament of…” I stop and look at Grams. My face flushes in the dark. “What’s your full name, Grams?”
She takes a labored breath. “Mary Ann Geraldine Carpenter.”
“That’s a good name,” I say with a smile. “This is the last will and testament of Mary Ann Geraldine Carpenter. As my last request, I would like to leave my entire estate including, but not limited to, my home, vehicle, furniture, and any money, to someone in dire need—to be chosen by my adoptive daughter, Charlie Cooper.”
Grams watches me. She doesn’t smile, but she doesn’t turn away, either. “I like that last part. About Charlie choosing who it goes to.”
My legal contract is completely phony, but that doesn’t matter. I just need to make Grams believe it’s real. “Will you sign it?” I ask. “I’ll take care of her. She won’t want for anything. You can trust me.”
Grams stops watching me and glances away. Her eyes find the ceiling, as if looking for a sign there. “Did Charlie ever tell you that before she met you, she was thinking about shutting down her charity?”
My stomach twists.
Grams raises a hand to the base of her throat. “She wasn’t sure if it was really helping anyone. And I guess no one new had signed up in several months. But then you came along, and suddenly that girl thought she could change the world. Every second you weren’t here, she was working on that charity. Hanging flyers, making a God-awful website, calling local businesses to see if they’d partner with her.” Grams looks me dead in the eye. “You made her believe again, so maybe I should believe you now.”
Every wall I’d put up, every protection I had in place to guard my heart, shatters into jagged little pieces. I can’t stop feeling. Can’t stop hearing what she just told me. Tears slip down my cheeks as Grams reaches for the piece of paper. She signs and hands it back. Grams is a good woman. Someone I care about. And as sorrow hits me like a wrecking ball, I realize I don’t want her to go. Not now. Not ever.
Yet there’s nothing I can do.
Except.
I stand from the chair and let my head fall back. Then I reach down, down into myself—further than I thought possible—and I tear away a seal and jerk it out. I nearly cry out from pain as it leaves my chest. When I look down, my vision is blurred with tears. But I can still make out the blue seal floating toward Grams’s torso.
Her face lights up when she sees it.
She sees it!
Warmth floods the room as her soul light flips on. Nearer and nearer the seal floats, and when it finally attaches to her soul, the room explodes in brilliance. I gasp and stumble backward as the blue crawls, destroying every last sin seal and wrapping her soul in an embrace.
Her soul cracks away from her body in a rush, like it’s eager to escape, and blazes into my body.
I fall back onto the floor.
The sensation—it’s overpowering.
Liberating a soul doesn’t feel the same as collecting. No. This feels different. It feels like bliss. Every day, I’ve resented getting assigned to liberate Aspen’s soul. But now I know with overwhelming certainty that I will complete the task. I want this same freedom for her. I want to feel her soul—heavy, tortured—spring from her body with vigor.
“Mary Ann,” I breathe, my voice breaking on her name.
She looks at me from her bed. I don’t know what I expect her to say. She saw what I did. I mean, she saw it. So I can’t imagine what’s going through her head, or what questions she’ll have. But when she speaks, she only has one request. “I want to see my granddaughter.”
23 
The Hive
The next day, when both hands on the clock pointed straight toward the sky, Mary Ann Geraldine Carpenter died.
Charlie was inconsolable at first, but she was also comforted that Grams was taken at high noon. “She liked her lunch hour,” Charlie said afterward. “Sometimes we skipped breakfast, and most times Grams ordered in for dinner. But lunch? If we were both home, Grams loved cooking the ‘high meal for highborn girls.’ Sometimes she’d make hot tea and swear we were both English.”