When I open my eyes, the light is soft. Under me, the floor is white and glossy, smooth like marble, and I lie on my back, staring up at a pale blue sky. Staring up at nothing.

After time passes and no one comes, I push myself up from the floor and get to my feet. My hair is soaking wet and water pours off my dress, dripping onto the glossy ground.

I look around, surprised to find that I'm surrounded by buildings, high-rises, shell-white and shimmering. The streets are wide and clean, and the sky is a pale, delicate blue.

"It's the same," I whisper to myself-to no one. My voice is shaking. "It's a city, it's just a city."

I thought Heaven would be better, more exalted. I thought the holy and the sanctified would look less like home. From the corner of my eye, I see a flutter of color like sunlight, someone moving, but then it's gone.

With cautious steps, I follow the parade of flickering lights across the empty plaza and into a vast, silent building.

The lobby is long and empty, with an atrium at the far end, full of pale light and delicate, translucent plants. A man is standing with his back to me, studying a pocket watch. As I cross the lobby, he turns and snaps the watch shut. It's Azrael.

I feel so tired. I feel like everything inside me has come undone and I just stand there, looking at him.

"You again," he says, and his voice sounds as tired as I feel.

Me again. I keep seeing movement from the corner of my eye, snatches of color and light, gone before I look.

He stands over me, arms folded against his chest. When he looks at me, his mouth twists in an odd sneer, showing perfect teeth. It's not a smile.

I stand looking up at him, dripping water all over the white floor. "I want to see Truman."

Around me, colors are squirming past in fits and pulses, but when I turn to look, there's nothing but white. I keep thinking I hear voices, low, impossible to decipher.

Azrael stares down at me, shaking his head. "Why in the name of goodness would I let you do that?"

"I love him," I say.

"Love him?" Azrael says, smiling for the first time. "I don't know if anyone's ever told you this, but you're a demon. You can't love."

"I can," I say breathlessly. "I can feel it, and it's wonderful and complicated and real. And he loves me."

Azrael's smile is bitter. "Let me tell you a little bit about demons. They love pain and other people's misery. They lie when it suits them and don't see anything wrong with it. They corrupt and kill and destroy, all without conscience. You just don't have the capacity for something as honorable as loving another person."

"That's not me, though. You're not talking about me. If you'd just listen-just believe me."

My throat aches and my vision has started to blur. Suddenly, tears are spilling down my face now, and they're hot. Not warm like over Truman's body in the street, but furnace-hot. They're the color of blood, trembling on my lashes and then they turn blue. White by the time they reach the ground. Where they fall, the floor smolders and starts to melt.

Smoke curls up from the floor, leaving charred pockmarks. Then the flames start, leaping around me, racing away in runners. "Please, I need to find Truman. I just need to see him."

Azrael steps closer, avoiding the guttering flames and blocking my view of the curtained window behind him. "Seeing him now would make no difference. He won't know you, and there's nothing you can do to make him know you now that he's forgotten."

I wipe my cheeks with my fingertips and the tears are scalding. "I think you're wrong."

The voices are hazy but insistent now, whispering all around me. My heart is beating very hard.

Behind Azrael, the window glows white behind its pale curtain and the voices are calling for me to go through it. With a dazed, heavy feeling, I push past him, toward the window. The curtain is thin, fine as gauze, obscuring what's beyond. I step through, pushing it away easily.

In a translucent garden, a boy is sitting on a bench under a crystal tree, holding the hand of a black-haired girl. Their heads are bent close together and they're talking in low voices.

As I step over the low windowsill and down into the courtyard, Truman turns to look at me. His eyes are a pale, transparent blue. His hair is dark blond, close-cropped and clean. He's different now, but I know him. I would know him with my eyes closed.

He stands, coming to meet me across the glass garden. He looks so long I want to hide my face in my hands. I fight the urge to turn away. It's so hard to look at him.

"You're wet," he says, reaching out to touch the water dripping down my face.

I'm holding onto myself, elbows cupped in my hands. "I had to be. I couldn't find you, otherwise."

He nods and smiles, like I'm actually making sense.

The girl has come up beside him, her hair long and shining, hanging in a sheet down her back.

I look at her, at the perfect lines of her face. "Why is she with you?"

He grins like the question is silly. "Well, I couldn't be happy without her."

Without me. She reaches for him and he takes her hand. He says, still looking at me, "I thought for a second that I knew you."

The black-haired girl smiles, so placid. "Who is she," we say, pointing to one another.

"That's Daphne," he tells us.

"Do you love her?" we ask.

"More than anything."

I'd thought that at those words I'd want to scream in triumph, to Heaven or Azrael or to God Himself. To shout See? See, he loves me. But Truman is holding the other girl's hand and she is not me.

Once, he told me that I was the thing in the world that made him happy, that I made him feel like he wasn't full of broken glass. Now, he's holding someone else's hand.

My eyes feel brittle and hot. The girl reaches out, smiling, patting my arm. But I know she's just a mockery of me, a doll made of how much I love. Of how much he loved me.

He keeps looking back and forth between us. "Don't I know you? I think I know you."

"Wouldn't you remember if we'd met before?" I reach out, taking his hand in mine, and he doesn't pull back. The three of us-Truman, the girl, and me-each holding someone's hand. He smiles as I turn over his wrist, then slide his shirtsleeve up, folding the cuff back carefully.

"What are you doing?" he says, like he might start laughing.

His wrist is smooth. There are no marks on his arms, not anywhere.

"What have they done to you?" I ask. Trace the pattern with my fingertip, like I could put it back on his skin. Close my eyes, imagine him sick, filthy, sobbing. When I look at him again, I see how healthy he looks. There is nothing broken in him now. "What have they done?"

"What do you mean?"

"Your wrists, they used to be . . . "

He laughs, sudden and bright. "See, I do know you. You look familiar, I just-I can't place it." Then his face clouds. "What about my wrists?"

"Nothing," I tell him, trying not to cry, afraid that if I burn heaven down, he will never love me. "They used to be-they used to be-"

"Hey," he says, reaching out. "It's okay. Why won't you just tell me what's wrong?"

Beside him, the ghost of me is standing with her chin lowered. They have always been so much braver, but now her eyes are filling with tears. They'll overflow and then I'll burn down the garden and it won't even be me doing it.

Truman reaches for me again, and this time he pulls me against his chest, cradling my head on his shoulder. It's like a physical hurt, being so close to him, like burning myself again and again.

I wrench myself from his arms. "Don't-you don't have to touch me."

He steps back, looking worried, and I want to grab him by the shoulders, smash my mouth against his, but I'm so, so afraid of how much it will hurt.

"Were you happy, on Earth?" I say.

He looks serious for the first time, and uncertain. "No," he says. "No, I wasn't happy."

"Why not?"

"A lot of things. I don't really remember all of them now. I was lonely. My mom-she died when I was sixteen. But even before that, I guess I wasn't very happy."

It makes my eyes sting to hear him talk easily about things he could barely say out loud when he was alive.

He says, "I don't remember a lot of it. I keep thinking I do, but then it gets mixed up." He stares at me so hard he must be looking past me. "There was this girl I knew. I think she saved my life."

"Yes, you were going to die. But she woke you back up."

"How do you know that?"

"It doesn't matter. She woke you up and you wished very hard that she hadn't. You wanted to stay asleep because it hurt too much."

"Hurt?" He's squinting down at me. "What are you talking about?"

I want to cover my own mouth so he can keep living in this white dream, but it scares me. "I love you," I say, and the ghost girl says it too.

He's looking at her, not at me, and his expression has turned cold. "You what?"

"Love you," I say again, watching her mouth move.

He steps back, even as she smiles up at him.

"Something's wrong." He's shaking his head. "Something's really wrong."

"What is it?" I ask, and now she's quiet.

"Her," he says, moving closer to me. "This isn't right. She wouldn't say something like that."

"How do you know?"

"I know her, I know what she's like. She just would never say that."

"Are you sure?" I say, hating that he would ever doubt it.

I have nothing to give Truman but the worst parts of himself. I can only give him back the fact that once, he cried upon realizing he wasn't dead. How can I ask him to choose that again?

"This is all wrong," he says. He's breathing too fast, a sharp, panicked sound. "How do I wake up? Please, you need to tell me how to wake up."

"Don't you want your perfect life?"

"I want my life."

"Then kiss me," I say, like someone is squeezing me by the throat. I know the fairy tales. "If you kiss me, you'll wake up."

He looks down into my face and his eyes are so blue. His mouth is open a little as he bends his head, and my cheeks feel hot and too shiny, like my tears have scalded everything. When he puts his hands on my shoulders, it burns, but in a way that barely even feels like anything once his mouth is on mine. I feel his tongue, warm and familiar, a flicker between my lips, then gone, and now I see the tree, stark and gouged and twisted, but alive.

He backs away, looking hurt, frightened. And now is not the time to be wondering if I've done the right thing. In front of me, he's gasping, taking long, hoarse breaths. My ghost is mute but trembling, reaching for my hand. We stand side by side as he begins to change.

At first, it isn't much. With his fingers pressed to his collarbone, he closes his eyes and now his face is thinner, gaunter. His sweater is turning dingy. Seconds ago, it seems, I sat on the floor while that same sweater burst into flames on my body. Now, it's unraveling at an alarming rate, new then old then nothing. I watch, holding the girl's hand so tightly, squeezing as Truman's hair turns lank and tangled. Why am I doing this? He could have been happy forever. How am I doing this?

When I open my mouth, the girl cries out beside me, a shrill, timid little cry, but I don't make a sound. I cover my mouth and his scars bloom pale and shining on his arms. I wrap my arms around her and we hide our faces in each other's hair.

"Daphne." His voice is husky, like the morning after I found him.

I expect us both to turn, but when I let go of the girl, she collapses at my feet, clattering in pieces where she lands. It's just me now, me and Truman Flynn, and surely this is the worst, most selfish thing I've ever done.

But when he looks into my face, his eyes are so pale they're almost like no color at all and he's already reaching, not looking anywhere but my face. And this time, the kiss is hard and hungry and laughing all at once. His hands slide over my shoulders and my waist, drifting to the back of my neck. He holds my face between his hands and presses his forehead to mine. I'm the real thing and he's smiling. He's smiling.

HEREAFTER.

Truman Flynn woke up.

Life after death was beautiful and extraordinary. Sometimes, the world was so vibrant and true that it became overwhelming, and he had to close his eyes and wait for the vertigo to pass. In the mornings, the sun rose, low and red on the horizon. The sprawl of towns and cities was so huge, so filled with buses and taxis and people.

He saw himself in the people that he helped-every child of every demon-and it didn't disgust him. What he saw only supported the fact that the work was good and necessary.

He didn't have Obie's memory for novels and sermons, so he read aloud, carrying paperbacks and collections of poetry everywhere he went. He sat beside hospital beds in recovery rooms. Sometimes he put flowers on graves.

Daphne was earnest, full of energy. She liked the kids best, and would sit on the floor with them, brandishing dolls and puppets, wearing nurses' whites or colored scrubs, hair pulled back in a ponytail. She looked older now, more substantial, more definite. She still smiled, though-that clear, open smile. And sometimes, she would spring at him, throwing her arms around his neck, and he would catch her.

And if he did get tired of the work from time to time, tired of the hopelessness, it was only because he'd been too close to it for too long, and then he left the shelters and the clinics and the sickrooms and went out into the world to see it.

On an afternoon in May, the two of them stood in the tropical fish exhibit at the aquarium, in front of the shark tank. On either side, the corridors stretched on, dim but clean. The building smelled damp and briny.

Daphne was fidgeting with her hair, looking thoughtful. "Obie used to tell me about the sea, how it was large and full of salt and angelfish."

Truman thought-for the first time in a long time-of his nights in the hospital, and the memory was clear, but not painful. Obie, standing over him, speaking kindly about stars and galaxies and all sorts of miracles.

"He was good at that. Describing things, I mean." He reached for her hand, warm, inarguable. On the other side of the glass, sharks were circling.

She stood with her nose against the glass as a sand tiger shark approached, its mouth bristling with teeth. It bumped its snout against the tank and she pressed her palm to the glass in return.