St. Mary's Church, Interior — July 2010
The back pew had a crack down the middle that pinched through the suit pants, and the hymnal rack was missing its Bible, and it was perfect because nobody sat here. The mourners clustered toward the front like gravity pulled them, leaving the last three rows to stragglers and ghosts.
I was both.
The church interior was modest — stained glass throwing colored shadows on whitewashed walls, wooden beams overhead dark with a century of varnish, ceiling fans turning slow enough to be decorative. A framed photo of Coach Buzzer sat on an easel beside the altar. Mid-sixties, broad smile, a whistle around his neck even in a portrait. The kind of face that made you stand up straighter without knowing why.
The five of them sat in the front pew, and they were wrong. Not wrong as in different from what I expected — wrong as in too real. Movies flatten people. They smooth out the weight around Eric's jaw and the tension in Lenny's shoulders and the way Kurt's knee bounced like it was powered by something internal he couldn't shut off. They erase the small things: Marcus's suit was expensive but wrinkled, like he'd slept in it and didn't care. Rob sat six inches farther from the group than everyone else, and the gap might as well have been a canyon.
Lenny Feder. Front and center, arm around Roxanne. She was striking — the kind of presence that rearranged a room — but Lenny wasn't looking at the altar or the photo or his wife. His jaw was working, the slow grind of a man holding a speech behind his teeth. His hand on Roxanne's shoulder gripped too tight. She didn't pull away, but her fingers found his and squeezed once. A correction, not a comfort.
Eric Lamonsoff sat to Lenny's left, whispering something to Sally that made her shake her head and pat his leg. Eric's shoulders were hunched forward in the posture of a man trying to take up less space in a room where he was already invisible. Sally's hand stayed on his leg. Steady.
Kurt McKenzie sat with Deanne on his right and Mama Ronzoni on his far side. The old woman's spine was military-straight, and every few seconds her eyes cut sideways to Kurt with an expression that could have been disapproval or grief or both. Kurt's knee bounced. Deanne, visibly pregnant, rested her hand on the bouncing knee without looking at him. It didn't stop.
Marcus Higgins sat at the end of the pew, slouched low enough that the woman behind him could see over his head. His phone was in his lap, screen angled away from Lenny. He cracked a joke — I couldn't hear it from the back, but two people laughed and three people glared, and Marcus's expression didn't change. A dry, thin-lipped non-reaction that said the joke was the point, not the response.
And Rob Hilliard.
Rob sat at the far edge, closest to the aisle, Gloria's hand resting on his forearm like a paperweight on a document that might blow away. His toupee was slightly off-center — tilted a few degrees left, visible only because I was looking for it. His eyes were on the photo of Coach Buzzer, but they weren't focused. The distant, glazed look of a man already rehearsing his exit.
They look exactly like the movies and nothing like the movies.
A woman in her early thirties moved between the altar and the side room with clipboard efficiency — adjusting the microphone stand, conferring with the priest, checking her watch without checking her watch. The funeral program listed her: Nora Ferdinando-Buzzer, granddaughter. No movie baseline for her. An original. She had Coach Buzzer's jawline and none of his softness, moving through grief like it was a project with deliverables.
The priest began. I won't pretend I listened to all of it — something about God's house having many rooms and Robert finding the one with the best court. A basketball metaphor. Buzzer would've liked it.
Mid-eulogy, the phone vibrated against my thigh.
I palmed it under the pew, angling the screen toward my chest. The app had generated a priority alert — red border, pulsing icon, the works.
[CRITICAL: Rob Hilliard — timeline corruption detected.]
[Confidence failure cascade begins in 6 hours.]
[If Rob Hilliard leaves the funeral before the wake, the lakehouse reunion WILL NOT OCCUR.]
[Accept mission?]
[Y/N]
Below the alert, the app displayed something new: an emotional overlay for the mission target. Rob's current state, rendered as a simple bar graph. A red bar labeled BELONGING — draining in real-time, the fill line ticking left like a fuel gauge in a car with a leak.
I looked up from the phone. Rob was checking his own phone under the pew, thumb scrolling through nothing. Gloria's hand tightened on his arm. Not comfort. An anchor. She'd done this before — the steady pressure of a woman who knew her husband's tells better than he did.
Six hours. If he walks out of this funeral and doesn't make it to the wake, the lakehouse weekend never happens. The whole first movie — the reconnection, the kids learning to play outside, the basketball rematch, Buzzer's ashes in the lake — none of it.
The eulogy ended. People stood. I stood with them, tucking the phone into my jacket pocket where the notification sat patient and warm.
The service wound through its rituals — hymns sung off-key by people who meant every word, a reading from Corinthians that made Eric's shoulders shake once before Sally's hand found his back. Lenny stood and spoke for three minutes. Controlled. Polished. The voice of a man who managed rooms for a living, applied to the room that mattered most. He told a story about Buzzer making them run suicides until Marcus threw up, and then making Marcus clean it up while the rest of them ran more suicides. Marcus muttered something from the pew that got a real laugh — the first one, and the church needed it.
When the service ended, the mourners rose and formed a line. Single file past the family, handshakes and hugs and the low murmur of sorry for your loss repeated until the words lost shape.
I joined the line. What else could I do?
Nora Ferdinando-Buzzer shook my hand with the polite blank smile of someone processing their fiftieth stranger of the morning. Her grip was firm, brief, professional.
"Thank you for coming," she said, and her eyes were already moving to the person behind me.
She doesn't know who I am. Nobody here does.
The five friends had clustered near the exit — Lenny the gravitational center, others orbiting at their natural distances. I drifted toward them the way you drift toward a campfire, knowing you don't belong there but needing the warmth.
Eric was the first to extend a hand. Big, warm, the handshake of a man who assumed the best about everyone until proven otherwise.
"Hey, thanks for being here. I'm Eric."
"Holden," I said, and the name fit my mouth better than it should have.
"Did you know Coach well?"
"Not as well as I should have."
Eric accepted this with a nod that held zero suspicion and maximum kindness. Lenny, behind him, gave me a quick once-over and a nod — the polite acknowledgment of someone who catalogued faces for a living and was already filing mine under unimportant. Kurt's eyes met mine for a half-second, sharp and assessing, before Mama Ronzoni pulled his attention with something pointed about the parking situation. Marcus didn't look up from his phone.
Rob.
Rob made eye contact that held a half-second too long. The look of a man checking if he should know this person. The Belonging bar pulsed in my jacket pocket like a heartbeat.
"Rob Hilliard," he said, and his handshake was softer than Eric's. Tentative.
"Holden Lawson. I'm sorry about Coach."
"Yeah." A pause. "Yeah, he was..." Rob's hand drifted toward his toupee, touched it once, dropped. "He was a good man."
Gloria appeared at his elbow, gentle as a tugboat. Rob let himself be steered away.
The group dispersed toward the parking lot, toward cars, toward whatever came next. I stood in the church foyer with the smell of lilies and furniture polish and other people's grief, and for one second I forgot the system, the mission, the body that wasn't mine. It just felt like a funeral. The universal weight of someone gone.
Then Rob excused himself from the group with a pat on Eric's shoulder and a wave that was too casual to be anything but rehearsed. Gloria trailed him by two steps, her purse already on her shoulder.
He was heading for the parking lot. Phone already out. The Belonging bar drained another tick.
Six hours on the countdown and the man's halfway to his car.
I pulled out my phone. The mission acceptance screen waited. My thumb hovered over Y.
I pressed it.
[MISSION ACCEPTED: ROB'S LAST EXIT]
[Temporal deployment initiating.]
[Countdown: 10... 9... 8...]
The countdown filled my screen in pulsing red numbers, and I was standing in the middle of a crowded church foyer with seven seconds until my body went into standby mode and my consciousness got launched three days into the past.
The bathroom. I needed the bathroom now.
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