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“That you know of. Maybe that Dateline episode just hasn’t aired yet,” Mac snapped back.

“Funny. But no. It’s not the towels. I’m more worried that I’m not sure if I asked him to move in because I want him to or because I’m a people pleaser.”

“Yes,” Mac replied.

“Yes, what?” I asked, confused.

“Yes, you asked him to move in because you want him and because you’re a people pleaser.”

“Not helpful. And I said ‘want him to,’ not ‘want him,’” I said, grinning into the phone, somehow feeling better.

“Taters. Capers,” Mac said, his answering grin echoing down the line.

“I’m pretty sure that’s not how the song goes.”

“Well, I’m pretty sure the whole point of the song is that people can say things however they want.”

“Point to you,” I said, rolling my eyes again.

“Don’t you roll your eyes at me, young lady,” Mac replied, sounding so uncannily like our mother that I shivered. “Tell me this: What do you really want?” he asked in his own voice.

“To never let him go again,” I said with zero hesitation.

“Then there’s your answer. Trust your gut. Let everything else take care of itself,” Mac suggested. “Uh oh,” he added. “G’s pitch went supersonic. Gotta go. Love you. Mean it. Bye.”

“Ugh!” I cried into the empty apartment as the phone went dead in my hand. I dropped it on the table with a scowl. Where had trusting my gut gotten me before? Into a nearly quarter-century marriage with someone who’d manipulated me until I was no longer useful to him?

Oh, are we pretending that your gut didn’t tell you to cut and run from the beginning, now? Grandma drawled. I see things in a different light now that I’m dead, but even back then it was plain as day that you bullied yourself into that situation.

“What are you talking about?” I asked, whirling to finally face the corner the voice was coming from.

As I’d suspected, I could picture her clearly, perched precariously on the edge of the windowsill, ridiculous cigarette holder snug between her index and middle finger, this time in a beaded white flapper dress that looked very at odds with the garish fuchsia of the pom-poms on her fuzzy orange mule slippers.

“What, no housecoat today?” I asked, arching an eyebrow at the ghostly form smirking at me from across the room.

She threw back her head and laughed, the sound transporting me right back to my aunt’s kitchen. While our mother and her sisters had taken magic very seriously, my grandmother had been irreverent about everything.

Hey, now, not everything, she protested, sitting up straighter to shoot daggers at me with her eyes.

Right, not everything. She’d brooked no sass about General Hospital or either of its spin-offs.

Wouldn’t kill you to leave the TV on once in a while, you know. I have a lot of catching up to do, she sniffed disdainfully, turning her head to look out the window. Nothing exciting happens out there at all. Whatever happened to a good coma or a surprise twin returned from the dead, I ask you?

There was no explanation for why that was the statement that finally made me accept what my rational brain had been trying to reason away for days, but Grandma cackled with glee as my eyes widened and my hand flew up to cover my gaping mouth.

Cottoned on finally, did you?

“You’re a… a…” I stuttered, my mouth struggling to form the word flashing in neon pink in my head.

Something like that, she said, shrugging nonchalantly.

Her dismissive gesture dislodged the cigarette dangling limply from the holder in her hand, and we both watched the lit butt swirl lazily to the ground—she with bemused curiosity, I with mounting concern. The red embers flared as they hit the living room’s ancient carpet, and I dove for it before whatever plastic they’d used in the decade it had been woven caught on fire and sent the whole place up in flames. My fingers closed on thin air, much to my grandmother’s delight.

“I don’t understand,” I said, glancing from my empty hand to the floor where a perfectly round burn was all that remained of what had been a live cigarette a moment earlier.

The rules are different on this side, Grandma said, taking a deep drag on a freshly lit cigarette, the fallen one nowhere to be seen.

“Where did it go?”