St. Mary's Church Fellowship Hall — July 2010
Rob Hilliard stood in the doorway of the fellowship hall with his car keys in one hand and his phone — now mercifully silent — pressed against his thigh like a weapon that had just betrayed him. His face had achieved a shade of red that should have come with a health warning.
Gloria, beside him, was biting the inside of her cheek. The crossword-puzzle patience was gone. She was trying not to laugh, and she was losing.
"It's not funny," Rob said.
"Honey, it's a little funny."
"It's Raining Men, Gloria. At a funeral."
"Coach Buzzer would have loved it."
Rob opened his mouth, closed it, and the fight went out of his shoulders. Because she was right, and they both knew it. Coach Buzzer would have laughed until his whistle fell off.
From the food table, Marcus Higgins raised a coffee cup without looking up from his phone.
"Eight out of ten," he said. "Timing was good. Song choice was inspired. Deducted two points for the face you made."
Kurt, standing next to Marcus with a plate of cold cuts: "I'd give it a seven. The initial blast was a ten, but you fumbled the recovery."
"I didn't — it wasn't — it's a glitch—"
"Rob." Eric appeared from somewhere with a plate in each hand, because Eric always had a plate. "Don't sweat it. Bean once played a YouTube video of a screaming goat during Sally's sister's wedding toast. These things happen."
"That was different," Sally said from behind Eric. "That was a child. This is a grown man with Weather Girls on speed dial."
I laughed. Couldn't help it — the sound came out before I could manage it, and Marcus's head turned toward me with the slow precision of a man who'd located a new audience member.
"See? New guy gets it."
"Holden," I said, because Marcus hadn't remembered from the handshake line, and I hadn't expected him to.
"Holden. Sure." Marcus took a sip of his coffee. "You got a rating for that ringtone disaster?"
"Nine. He stuck the landing by not actually leaving."
Marcus considered this. A micro-expression crossed his face — the corner of his mouth lifting a fraction, the Spade equivalent of a standing ovation.
"Nine's generous. I respect the scoring philosophy."
And just like that, I was in the orbit. Not the inner circle — you don't get there in five minutes at a wake. But the outer ring, the gravitational pull of five men who'd known each other for thirty years and had a specific frequency of humor that either repelled strangers or absorbed them. The ringtone glitch was doing what my motivational speech in Rob's apartment couldn't: it was making Rob visible. Every time the phone fired again — and it did, roughly every twenty minutes, at volumes that violated church acoustics — people turned, laughed, and Rob's embarrassment pulled him deeper into the room instead of out the door.
The system broke his phone to keep him here. That's either brilliant or cruel, and I can't decide which.
The wake settled into its rhythm. Casserole dishes appeared on folding tables with the silent efficiency of church ladies who'd been doing this for decades. Coffee urns steamed. The volume lifted from hushed grief to actual conversation, because that's what wakes do — they remind the living that being alive involves noise, and food, and the specific awkwardness of laughing at a gathering for the dead.
I worked the room. No skills, no system assists, just a transmigrator's knowledge of who everyone was and what they cared about.
Sally Lamonsoff's earrings: handmade, silver wire wrapped around blue sea glass. In the first movie, there's a brief moment where she mentions making jewelry as a hobby. Nobody in the room would know that detail about a secondary character's wife.
"Those are beautiful," I told her while refilling my coffee. "Did you make them?"
Her hand went to her ear. "I — yes, actually. Thank you."
"The wrapping technique is really clean. My, uh, my aunt used to do wire work."
A lie. I didn't have an aunt anymore, or a family, or a previous life that existed in any verifiable way. But Sally's face warmed, and Eric — hovering as always — beamed like I'd just complimented his entire household.
Kurt McKenzie stood by the window with a plate he wasn't eating, watching the room with the observational intensity of a man who catalogued everything and trusted nothing. His knee bounced even while standing. Deanne was sitting with the kids across the room, one hand on her pregnant belly, and Kurt's eyes tracked back to her every ninety seconds.
"Your kids are well-behaved," I said, leaning against the wall beside him. "Andre and Charlotte, right? Coach mentioned them."
Kurt's head turned. The eyes were sharp — not suspicious, but assessing. Like a calculator running numbers it didn't have enough data to solve.
"Coach talked about my kids?"
"He was proud of the whole group. All of you. The families you built."
A beat. Kurt's jaw worked. Then: "Yeah. He was good like that." A pause. "I don't think we've actually met."
"Holden. I knew Coach when I was younger, before I moved away."
"Uh huh." Kurt took a bite of his untouched cold cuts. Chewed. His eyes stayed on mine a half-second longer than comfortable. "You moved away from here? Where to?"
"Around. Bounced a lot." I kept it vague because vague was all I had. The system's dossier on Holden Lawson was a blank page with a name on it.
"Around." Kurt nodded, and the nod carried the exact weight of a man who'd heard a non-answer and filed it for later reference. "Well, welcome back."
He walked away. Smooth, unhurried. I made a mental note: Kurt notices when the math doesn't add up. Avoid being near Kurt when lying.
The phone buzzed against my thigh. Not the ringtone glitch — that was Rob's problem. My phone, with the system interface, displaying a cooldown timer:
[COOLDOWN: 4:47:22 remaining]
[Mission retry available upon cooldown completion.]
[Recommendation: Use observation period to revise approach strategy.]
Four hours and forty-seven minutes. An eternity of small talk and cold lasagna.
Across the room, Roxanne Chase-Feder stood with a glass of water and the posture of someone who'd walked a thousand red carpets and could make a church fellowship hall look like a gallery opening. She was watching me. Not obviously — she was mid-conversation with Deanne about something that involved hand gestures and laughter — but her eyes kept returning to where I stood. The evaluating look of a woman who'd spent two decades in Hollywood surrounded by people performing, and who could spot a performance the way a jeweler spots cubic zirconia.
She's clocked me. Not as a threat — as an unknown. And Roxanne doesn't like unknowns.
I moved through the rest of the crowd. Shook hands with mourners who didn't know me. Listened to three separate people tell the same story about Coach Buzzer at slightly different volumes. Found a seat in a quiet corner where the folding chairs were arranged facing nothing and sat down with a paper plate of lasagna that someone's grandmother had made with the kind of love that transcends the need for a recipe.
The lasagna was extraordinary. Not restaurant-extraordinary — home-extraordinary. The noodles were soft in a way that meant they'd been boiled with patience, and the meat sauce had a depth that suggested someone had been stirring it since five in the morning while watching cable news. I ate the entire plate and went back for seconds because I was alive and the food was good and both of those facts deserved respect.
From my corner, I watched Rob.
Not through the system lens — the mission was on cooldown and the emotional overlay was grayed out. Just watching. Human observation. The lost art of paying attention to someone without an objective.
Rob told a story about Coach Buzzer. Standing near the photo easel, with Gloria at his elbow and two elderly women listening, he told the story of Buzzer teaching him to tie a tie before junior prom. His hands moved as he talked — demonstrating the knot, the loop, the pull — and his voice dropped into the warm register of a man reliving a memory he'd polished smooth with years of private revisiting. The two women teared up. Gloria's hand found Rob's back. Rob's toupee had tilted slightly from all the gesturing, and he didn't fix it, and for the first time all day he didn't look like a man measuring his distance to the exit.
He told another story. Buzzer driving to Rob's house at midnight when Rob was thirteen because Rob had called the team line crying after his parents fought. Buzzer sat in the driveway for two hours, engine running, letting Rob talk through the passenger window until the tears stopped.
He told a third. Buzzer calling him "Robbie" at graduation, the only adult who used that name, and how Rob had looked for that name in every relationship since and never quite found it.
Rob Hilliard was most alive when he was talking about someone he loved. Not when someone was talking at him — not when a grief counselor with a lanyard was delivering motivation from a chair that was harder than it looked. When Rob was giving — sharing, offering, opening the door to someone else's memory — the walls came down and the toupee went crooked and the man underneath was luminous.
That's the strategy. Don't tell Rob to go to the funeral. Ask him about Buzzer. Let his own love do the work.
The cooldown timer ticked below the two-hour mark. I finished my second plate of lasagna, refilled my coffee from the urn that tasted like it had been brewing since the Nixon administration, and settled in to wait.
Rob's phone screamed "It's Raining Men" one more time — this time during Lenny's quiet conversation with the priest. Marcus, without missing a beat:
"Nine point five. Took down the alpha. Bonus points."
Lenny turned slowly, gave Marcus a look that could have cured leather, and turned back to the priest. Rob fled to the bathroom. Gloria stayed, arms crossed, smiling.
Two hours and twelve minutes. I could wait.
The cooldown hit zero while I was refilling my coffee for the third time. The system notification pulsed amber:
[COOLDOWN COMPLETE. Mission retry available.]
[ROB'S LAST EXIT — Attempt 2 of 2]
[Deploy? Y/N]
I set the coffee down. The cup left a ring on the folding table. My hands were steady.
I walked to the bathroom, locked the stall door, and pressed Y.
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