The ghost was forty-three years old and had different hands.
Cass noticed the hands first, years ago, before she understood what she was looking at. The ghost held things differently: a mug, a doorframe, a pen. As if the hands had been used for something else entirely, shaped by a different set of repetitions into a different tool.
Now she was used to it.
Her ghost appeared most clearly in the mornings, in the kitchen before anyone else was up, when the house was still and the light was thin. The ghost would be standing at the counter, or sitting at the table, or near the window with a cup of something hot, and Cass would come downstairs and see her there and feel something that was neither dread nor grief: more like two notes played simultaneously that are almost but not quite the same pitch. Not dissonance. Something between harmony and discord that has no name.
Her therapist had said, years ago, that the ghost was a manifestation of grief. The path not taken. Cass had nodded. She had not told her therapist that the ghost had different hands.
The ghost grew more present after her father died. Then again after her divorce, not because the divorce was the wrong choice but because it was the kind of upheaval that seemed to clear the air, the way a storm does. After the storm, the ghost was sharper. More detailed. Cass could see the crow's feet now, and the specific way the ghost held her mouth when she was thinking. Features she recognized as her own, worn differently.
At twenty, the ghost had been a blur. A sense of movement at the edge of things.
At forty-three, she sat across the breakfast table from Cass while Cass drank her coffee, and sometimes Cass said good morning, and the ghost did not respond but also did not seem not to hear.
This morning the ghost had brought something with her. A quality of attention, more focused than usual, that made Cass set down her mug and look.
The ghost was looking at her hands.
Cass looked at her own hands. The same hands, worn differently: the specific calluses, the ways the rings had left marks and then the marks had faded.
She thought: what did you make?
She had asked this before. She had never received an answer. The ghost was not there to answer questions. The ghost was there the way weather is there: as an atmosphere, a condition, a fact of the day you must account for when deciding what to wear.
But this morning the ghost looked up from her hands, and across the table, and for a moment the thing between them was not the usual not-quite-dissonance.
Cass could not have said what it was. Closer than usual. The two notes almost the same pitch, the interval between them so small that for a moment you could believe the chord was resolved.
Then the light changed as the sun cleared the roofline, and the ghost was gone, and Cass sat alone in the kitchen with her cold coffee and her ordinary hands and the particular morning that was hers.