“Yes and no.” He takes another drink. Dan’s dishonest by nature, but it feels cruel to lie about something like this. “I fell apart pretty bad in the immediate aftermath, couldn’t function at all for months, danger to myself and others, in and out of jail, that kind of thing, so I reckon it ain’t as bad as that anymore, at least. I’m coexisting with it.”

He goes back to scratching marks in the wood. He isn’t at peace with it. He thinks he never will be. He thinks losing a child is something impossible to ever be at peace with.

This is more than he’s said to anyone, really, even Bunny. Bunny lost like this too, but millennia before he and Dan met. Miguel seems the same tightly-wound ball curled around his grief, as if to loosen his grip would be to let the memory slip out and away, that Dan so identifies with.

“A year is really recent. Too recent. Is this the first Day of the Dead since?”