The stairs groan beneath her as she makes her way down into the salt-stained basement. Moonlight pours in through a high window, splitting the room into two porous halves. She waits at the bottom for the darkness to adjust to her.

  The candles first. They’re gathered in a loose circle in front of a mirror she’d found at an estate sale the autumn after, its gold frame tarnished and its silver half-eaten. A match flares hot against her palm and one impatient flame becomes two and three and four.

  Then the daisies. Yellow hearts dressed in white. Weeds elevated to treasures by small hands that don’t know yet what ordinary means. She lays them out in the center of the circle, one by one.

  She sets the stuffed bear against the mirror. It slumps over, enormous and exhausted. Its fur is worn flat by years of devotion and white stuffing spills from the seam at its arm. She props it upright and whispers something too soft for the air to carry.

  Only then the photo. A boy of six standing on the beach, laughing in the sunlight of a moment that never ends. She doesn’t let her eyes to rest on it. She can’t. She used to cradle the frame against her chest as she wept for hours that bled into days. But that kind of grief was a storm that had passed through her and what it left behind was a climate she’s learned to inhabit.

  She kneels in front of it all and considers the arrangement, how the knowledge of the rite had arrived as an impossible certainty from the marrow of her bones. She breathes in. The candles breathe with her. A calm drapes itself across her shoulders and she exhales. She says his name and the candles burn like it was fuel.

  She peers into the mirror, waiting for something to shift, but she sees only herself cast in the wavering light. Ordinary. Tired. Shadows collecting beneath her eyes, hair clinging in neglected strands to a face she barely recognizes. She lets her focus soften and it passes through her reflection and through the glass into what lies beyond. She calls his name again.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  A chill. Not cold. That primitive electrical sense of someone passing too close behind. It starts at the base of her skull and travels down between her shoulder blades. She tries to shake it but she can’t. Her eyes sweep the room for its source. When a second current surges through her she knows they’ve found something that isn’t there. She’s suddenly aware of a heart that’s measuring half seconds. Her mouth has gone dry. She tries his name again but it comes out broken.

  The candles falter then recover to an uneasy flicker and shadows in the reflection scatter and rearrange themselves. In the darkness behind her something refuses to disperse. A subtraction of light, the unmistakable outline of a child, standing where nothing should. It doesn’t stir. Doesn't speak. It hums through the glass and the brick and her sternum. Pressure more than sound. Its arm is held out and its hand is opened toward her.

  Her body moves before she can think to stop it. Her hand rises without permission and hovers over the shadow’s reflection, aligning finger for finger. She presses her palm flat. What she feels is something colder than the glass. The surface loses its certainty, the boundary forgets itself and it softens against her skin. It doesn’t break or push back. But through it she can feel what’s waiting on the other side.

  It would be something, a shape to replace the way he fit into her arms, to fill the hollow ache between her ribs. Wasn’t something better than nothing? All she would have to do is let it cross. The hum swells and the mirror gives way by another treacherous fraction and for a moment she lets herself believe she could say yes.

  She pulls her hand back.

  The candles have burned themselves to their ends. She snuffs out each flame and the scent of warm wax and fading daisies rises up. She collects the night’s wilted flowers from the circle’s center and last night’s and the ones from the night before. She glances up at the mirror just long enough to confirm what she already knows. The shadow remains, waiting.

  “I just want my son.”