“Do you really think he’d want to be buried here?” I ask Greer.
“It’s where he was happiest.”
I only knew him for one day. These were his best friends. If theythink this is what he would’ve wanted, who am I to say otherwise? I nod my agreement, and a tension I wasn’t even aware was there slowly seeps out of the group.
WE HAVE A SMALL FUNERALfor Zach when we get back to the lodge. Imogen brings out candles—all of them jarred and smelling like lilac and lemongrass—and as we light them, we share a few words about him. Ros recalls when the two of them tried axe-throwing in the woods. “We were crack shots!” she claims, until Kemy reminds her how the axe ricocheted off a tree trunk and sent them both screaming into the bushes. Kemy explains how he got so frustrated whenever he lost a board game (like flip-the-table, scatter-the-pieces frustrated) that they all started letting him win. Imogen describes the hours he spent trying to masterbakasana, crow pose, only to end up with a pounding headache from falling on his forehead.
“What about you, Nicola?” she asks. “Do you want to share anything?”
“Oh.” I draw back from these people who knew him for years. “I mean, we’d never even met before yesterday—”
Ros brushes off my comment. “Please. It’s like Greer said, we’re family here. Doesn’t matter if you’ve been coming for a day or a decade.”
Family. “All right.” The candle warms my palms as I hold it closer. “Zach swapped seats with another passenger so we could sit together on the flight here. I had no idea who he was—in fact, I was terrified that he was a reporter who wanted to badger me for a headline—but once I realized he was a member of the club… he started to feel like the brother I never had. My parents always wanted a big family, and I never understood why until now. Having people you can trust, who trust you, matters. Knowing you belong matters.”
Imogen rests a hand on my shoulder and, after a long, mournful silence, starts singing in a paper-thin soprano: “Closing Time.” One by one, we join in, our voices merging together. Even Connor mumble-mouths some of the words in a clear attempt at solidarity. When we reach the chorus, Ros suddenly throws her head back and starts screaming the lyrics into the sky, the same way Zach did around the bonfire, painfully off-key. We all burst into laughter and join her—hollering so loud, a spray of birds erupts into the sky, branches rattling in their wake.
The only one who doesn’t sing, who hovers at the back of the group, eyes locked on the blanket-covered body, is Greer.
NO ONE KNOWS HOW LONGdigging out the hole will take, so we split the work into shifts. Connor and Greer take the first one, breaking ground, followed by Kemy and Imogen, then Ros and Hannah. Greer volunteers to take a second shift alongside me. All day long, we can hear the grunts from outside, the crunch of the shovels, the metallic slide of silt across their blades.
We try our best to ignore it. Imogen leads a yoga class in the second-floor loft while Connor and Greer punch through the topsoil. We unroll the mats and flow through the poses: Forward fold.Crunch. Plank.Crunch. Upward dog.Crunch. Downward dog.Crunch crunch crunch. By the end, we all feel tenser than when we started.
Ros and Hannah come back from their shift at the end of dinner, sweat patches on their shirts, hands blackened with grime. “You’re up,” Ros says, clapping Greer on the shoulder. She leaves dirty streaks where her fingers touched, but Greer doesn’t seem to notice.
“You ready?” she asks. I nod, then the two of us put on our jackets and head outside.
It’s chilly tonight, but after a few minutes of hard labor, I’ll probablybe sweating just as much as Ros and Hannah were. I pick up a shovel, its handle still warm. “So, what do we need to do?”
“This should be the last shift in terms of diggingoutthe grave.” She jumps into the hole, about three feet deep, then stabs her blade into the dirt. “It gets tougher the farther you go. You’ll want to bring the pickaxe down here in case we need to break up any rocks.”
“Thepickaxe?”
She nods toward the tool that has been tossed on the lawn. I grab it and join her down in the hole. “You know, most retreats opt for team-building scavenger hunts, maybe two truths and a lie.”
The joke feels forced, but I can’t take much more grief. I jab my shovel in as far as I can. She’s right: It’s harder than it looks.
“No one says we can’t do both. Let’s see, my favorite color’s yellow. My mom’s dead. My dad’s a serial killer.”
“Tough one.”
“You know me. Riddle wrapped in a mystery and all that shit.”
My elbows wobble as I try to heave the silt over the rim of the grave. Some accidentally scatters onto the blanket still covering Zach. The last conversation he and I shared replays in my mind. “Hey, can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“The night before he…” I can’t bring myself to say the word. “Zach accused you of lying. He was drunk at the time, and depressed, so I didn’t think much of it, but I was wondering if you knew what he was talking about.”
“He accused me oflying?”
“Yeah.”
“You know I’m a lawyer, right? Lying literally pays my bills.”
“I’m serious.”
She cups the end of the handle with both palms, leans against it. Her eyes have a faraway look, like she’s mentally running through thepast few years, trying to figure out what he could’ve meant. I can tell the moment she comes up with nothing, her gaze clearing, snapping back to the present. “No idea.”
