The cathedral doors are heavy, but I push through them into the open air. Chicago has a smell, I’m realizing. I almost kind of missed it. I thought coming here would give me something. Closure, maybe. Or at least the chance to say what I needed to say, even if Bastian couldn’t hear it.
I hated what you became. I loved you anyway.
You’re going to be a father.
But I didn’t get to say any of it. The funeral was supposed to be an ending. Credits rolling on a movie. Humphrey Bogart’s final line and fog rolling over the screen before it all went to black.
Instead, I feel worse than when I arrived. I have unfinished business with a dead man who took all the answers with him.
Yasmin catches up to me on the sidewalk, slightly out of breath. “Well,” she says after a moment, “that was…”
“I was
