The vestry smells of damp slate and the stale, sweet ghost of incense. Megan Pritchard pulls the heavy parish register from its shelf, the leather cool and slightly tacky against her palms. She is a woman who has spent forty years in hospice wards counting breaths, and she knows that death, while inevitable, is rarely punctual.
She turns the vellum pages back three years to the day she arrived in the village. Her eyes move down the neat, looped script of Reverend Vaughan and the steadier, older hand of Dr Glyn Hughes. The pattern is silent at first, buried in the names of neighbors she now greets at the post office. Then the dates begin to chime like a bell. Davies, Wednesday. Thomas, Wednesday. Evans, Wednesday.
Fourteen names. Every single funeral for thirty-six months has been held on a midweek afternoon. It isn't possible. She reaches the final entry, the ink barely faded: 'Elwyn Rhys, Wednesday 14th.' Megan’s finger traces the column of dates, stopping dead as a shadow falls across the frosted vestry window.
