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“I am a one-woman show. You know that. And I have more important things to worry about.”
“Like Augustus.”
Her heart squeezes. “Like Augustus.”
Her newest client, Augustus Fox, is a wealthy hotel magnate. He’s flying her and his family to Hawaii for one last family vacation. It’s the oddest job she’s ever had.
And Ash is the odd-job queen.
She tried. Tried hard to do the thing known as the American dream and make something of herself.
After high school, she enrolled at USC, where she did poorly. Couldn’t sit. Mind too wild. She dropped out. Meanwhile, Tessie excelled, working her ass off in school while waitressing to pay for it and eventually flourishing in her interior design career.
Ash spent most of her twenties playing Russian roulette with entry-level positions, taking the first humdrum desk job she could find, one after another. She burned through seven in her first year. And she hated them all. With the burning passion of a thousand fiery suns. The butt-in-a-chair-and-work mentality. Corporate ass-kissing. The part of life where a person is required to get a paycheck in order to live.
It was too rote. Too boring.
She longed to do something unhinged and beautiful.
Eventually, that need led her to death.
The first death that hit hard wasn’t personal. It was Princess Diana. Her mother and aunt cried. Big tears that rivaled the tears they’d shed when they watchedSteel Magnolias. It confused young Ash. It fascinated her. She was glued to the TV. The funeral. Thatenvelope sitting atop the casket.What was in it? What did it say? Would Diana ever really know?She asked Tessie what she thought happened to people when they died. Her cousin responded with a shrug and anI don’t know.
Ash didn’t know either. So she went to the library. She read book after book. Had all kinds of questions.Where do we go? Does the big man in the sky greet people with cocktails and high fives? Or is it an endless black nothing?
And then, when she and Tessie were seventeen, death hit closer to home. Her Aunt Sophie, Tessie’s mother, passed.
Core memory there, that feeling of her stomach sinking. That knowledge that nothing in the world she knew would ever be right again. The sight of Tessie collapsing to her knees in the hallway of the hospital and sobbing with her entire soul,I don’t know how to do this, and even though her words scared her so fucking badly, set a fire loose in her chest, Ash took her in her arms and swept her off to all-night movie marathon.
Her mom was sad. Her best friend was sad. She was too, but all Ash wanted to do was heal them. Help. Only, she didn’t know how.
Over the years, Ash honed her craft. Her job search skills. Off-jobs, this time. Dog walker. Art model. Say what you want about LA, but she has had one fantastic job after another. After discovering she had a talent for crying on cue, she started her own business. She became a professional funeral mourner. Then, after her botched relationship with Jakob, she expanded into professional wedding objector.
A profession she abandoned three years ago.
Nathaniel Whitford and his dagger-eyed glare haunt her nightmares. The pain on his face. What she did. Everything about it was icky.Shewas icky.
She didn’t like herself in that period of her life. Jakob’s betrayal launched her into her villain origin story. It changed the trajectory of her life and influenced the decisions she made. Objecting toweddings, hurting people even if they deserved it, were very bad decisions. She fumbled. Eventually, she worked to course correct.
The change began soon after the Nathaniel Whitford almost-wedding. While she was attending a funeral, working as a professional mourner, she met a woman who was a death doula. They had coffee after, and the prospect pulled her in. It felt like ahell yes. Every aspect of it—the freedom of care she could offer, the lack of strong regulations that came with working in an office, the fact that death is the most natural part of life, yet somehow generates so much fear.
Two weeks later, Ash enrolled in a death midwife certification and earned the first degree she’s ever had.
After two years, she can confidently say that her death doula gig is no longer an odd job. It’s her passion. A calling she’s honored to have found.
New leaf.
Helping, not hurting.
“Remind me again,” Tessie says, bringing her back to the conversation. “You’re gone for how many days?”
“Fourteen-ish.” Ash squints, working to recall the itinerary she’s barely scrolled through. Go-with-the-flow is more her speed. “We fly out tomorrow morning at nine and land in Honolulu.”
“God. I wish I could come and rot on a beach with you.”
“I wish you could too,” Ash says, then groans. “Why couldn’t I get a client who likes snow in the Alps?” She thrives among new people. She just doesn’t thrive in subtropical climates.
Tessie snorts. “You hate snow too.”
