Page 1 of The Girl Who Inherits the Dead

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Her entire life, Delina Frisse has always felt she’s missing something.

Something big.

Something defining. That once she figured it out, once she unlocked whatever it is inside, she would fundamentally change as a person. She would fundamentally know herself, and all of this hand shaking, dust covered nothing inside of her will disappear.

Sure, everyone thinks her life is pretty grand. She has a semi-cushy job messing with spreadsheets for people who can’t, she lives in a condo in Prescott paid for in full because her bio-mother was some strange rich science person, and she has a doting boyfriend. Her dad lives in Sedona, just close enough that she can visit him and get home cooked food but just far enough away that it’s not suffocating.

She gets to dress well, more polished than the cowboy fashion in Prescott, drives to a bigger city to get her hair done, keeps her manicures up to date and her nails sharp, and everyone thinks she is the one that has her shit together. That nobody that composed could have something missing.

She used to think it was because she never knew her bio-mother. That it was some deep psychological need for her to know the person who gave birth to her, but that just took one college psychology class to dismiss. By all accounts, her bio-mother was some odd scientist up the coast of Vancouver who didn’t really want a kid, and definitely didn’t want a husband. Her dad spoke of her with a detached fondness, but even he shrugged when the notification came that she had passed.

Maison, Delina’s boyfriend, had just sat and listened when Delina told him of the weird feelings over her bio-mother’s death, his handsome face completely unmoving, before he took her out to the brewery that night and got them both absolutely trashed.

He’s good like that.

But there’s still something, some nebulous something out there, that should be different. It creeps along the edges of Delina’s vision when she isn’t paying attention, itches at the back of her mind. Like a lost tooth or a phantom limb or another sense that she just doesn’t have access to. Like sometimes, if she touched things, she could expect something else to happen.

It never does. She’s completely normal, completely generic, run of the mill person. She’s just another person, even with the nagging sense that she’s not.

And, of course, it all gets blown to hell by something as simple as a phone call on her day off.

The day starts off normal,in her normal day-off routine in her normal, boring life. Maison wakes before she does, for the long commute to his work from home office, where he sits in a chair that’s bad for his back and fiddles with photoshop for somegraphic design company or another, leaving Delina alone in bed for a good hour and a half.

She stares up at the ceiling, blank and white in the late October sun of Northern Arizona, until she can work up the energy to do something about it. Work up the energy for another day where she should be completely content and completely happy.

That never comes.

With a sigh, she forces herself to get up, to get dressed in the cute matching gym clothes that should spark joy but don’t and to throw her blonde hair into as fashionable of a ponytail as she could muster.

Maison stirs from his desk as she strides by the office, sticking his head out the door. His soft brown hair sticks up a bit in the back, a tell-tale sign that he didn’t bother brushing it before starting in on his art, but the glance he gives her is as alert as it ever is.

“Morning, Delly-girl,” he murmurs, catching her by the wrist and kissing the palm of her hand like he’s some knight in a story book. “Sleep okay?”

“I guess,” she says, and he gives her one of his smiles, crooked with a dimple.

He’s one of those people who seem generically good looking, generically handsome, until she gets his attention focused on her. Then all ideas of anything in her mind, any unhappiness or discontent or worry, all gets blown away.

It’s a smile that says she’s safe. A smile that says she’s the most important thing in the world. A smile that says there is nothing else that matters to him but looking at her, nothing else that matters but their small bits of connection.

She had called it charisma, when she first met him. Her friends called it a crush.

He’s everything anyone would ever want in a long-term boyfriend. He’s handsome, he’s kind, he makes her food and makes her laugh, so the moment he had worked up the guts to ask her out she practically jumped him, and hasn’t looked back.

“I might get to paint today,” Maison says with an almost dreamy smile of his own, jerking his thumb back towards his computer setup. “That is, unless they decide to give me an entire second project.”

He’s always in a better mood when he paints. Always emerges like he’s discovered a new world, discovered something groundbreaking and can’t wait to share it with her. She has a hundred small paintings he’s done, tucked into her wallet and used as bookmarks and everything in between. He paints on small scraps of newsprint, on the back of receipts, on whatever good paper he can collect in the world.

It’s a little magical how he can conjure something out of nothing, where the most creative she gets is a particularly satisfying pivot table.

His grey eyes flicker up to hers, quickly perceptive in the way that leaves her marveling. “You okay?”

“Having one of those days,” she says, and he nods, pulling her towards him until he can wrap his arms around her.

They’ve talked, at length, about her ‘days’. About the times she feels hollow, the time she feels something is missing.

So she leans against him, against the familiar strength in his shoulders.

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