On a wooded hillside outside Pittsburgh, where the rivers braid together and the bridges flash yellow in the sun, there stands an old private school no one ever remembers enrolling in. Ivy grips its cracked bricks. Moss blurs the leaded windows. To almost anyone looking, it appears abandoned. Unless they are the newly dead. If that is the case, it is more of an inevitability.

Souls arrive here as if tugged by a current. They cross the lawns without footsteps and enter halls that smell faintly of chalk and autumn leaves. It is here they are told they have died. Not passed on, as it seems to those who grieve them. Passing on is what they are here to do. No more than three months. “A season,” the counselors call it. “The last season of your life.”

Then you must go.

The counselors do not pretend to know what comes next. They only know this: Before a soul’s last season ends, each must review the contents of their lives and come to terms with them if they are to move on to whatever does come next.

Sometimes a soul will choose the screening room, where their lives play out before them on the silver screen. Others prefer the library, where they review their lives in the pages of a book. No matter which way they choose, on the screen or within their own minds, their lives—every ordinary afternoon and terrible joy—scroll by. And, at the end, when the lights come up in the screening room, or when a librarian comes round the corner to the table where someone had been reading their book, the soul has gone. The screen is black. The book’s pages are empty.

The only other choice, if it can be called that, is to leave the institute and try to remain on Earth, feeding on whatever attention or remembrance or fear you can muster or find in others, as your spirit grows thin and sharp. Those who don’t want to leave the world call this survival. The counselors call it denial.

Patrick King had been a counselor for more years than he could remember. He himself had died at seventeen. His boyfriend Jonas had been driving when he’d slid on black ice and they’d spun into a ravine. Jonas survived. Patrick didn’t. When he’d arrived at the doorstep of the institute a few days later, inconsolable, Graham, his own counselor, an old man with hands like folded maps, couldn’t persuade him to view his own life in this, his last season. On Patrick’s last day before he had to make the choice, Graham didn’t appear behind his desk in his counseling office. Instead, a file folder with papers drifting out of it lay on Graham’s desk, and when Patrick picked it up, he found the name of a new soul at the institute listed underneath his own, which had the additional title of counselor beside it. His first client. The institute had chosen him to take Graham’s seat.

It was a rare mercy and a cruel one. Counselors were allowed to stay beyond their last season, allowed to exist without their spirits withering, though this was only possible in the service of helping others do what they themselves couldn’t.

They were also allowed weekend furloughs. On rotation, of course, as new souls were always showing up. Patrick always took his turns.

The rules were clear: The living could never see the dead as themselves, so Patrick became a rotation of stranger’s faces in Jonas’s life. A graduate student passing Jonas on the steps of the Cathedral of Learning. A middle-aged runner on the trails in the park. A regular at the café where Jonas worked the espresso machine with the same careful hands he used to place upon Patrick’s cheeks as he kissed him. Patrick learned to speak in half-true sentences, to smile vaguely, without recognition, to accept the dissatisfying ache of being known only as a blur.

It was better than nothing. He told himself that every time he returned from seeing Jonas and the life that had been taken from him.

Then Sara arrived.

She was sixteen and defiant, two weeks late to the institute after her death, which was nearly unheard of. Most souls followed the paths there within days, without even trying. Sara, though, had lingered in the rooms of her old life for a time instead, refusing the call. When Patrick explained the institute—“its . . . dynamics,” he called its processes—when he told her about the clock ticking inside her chest, Sara laughed, sharp and disbelieving.

“You’re saying this is it?” she said. “Three months and a movie or a book? Do you at least offer snacks?”

“It’s more than a movie or a book,” Patrick said. “It’s your life.”

“Then why are you still here?” she asked. Her stare was cold, and Patrick looked down at his hands, folded together on the desk that used to be Graham’s.

They met three times a week. Sara talked about her mother, who had survived her husband’s death when Sara and her brother were small children, taking care of them on her own afterward. She talked about her brother’s talent for drawing, about the way, before she died, she’d been planning to dye her hair blue. Patrick listened and learned the dangerous geography of sympathy, how some counselors loved their assignments too much.

Still, when Sara smiled, something loosened in him. When she cried, he forgot the clock.

He told Anne he needed help.

Anne had been at the institute longer than anyone—over a century, some whispered. She wore her time lightly, like a shawl. Patrick told her Sara was difficult. Anne watched him with eyes that missed nothing.

“You’re attached,” she said gently.

“I’m failing,” Patrick said, and it sounded like truth because it contained some.

Anne told him not to worry. She said she would take Sara’s case on herself.

Sara did not forgive him the change, though. A few weeks before her last season was supposed to end, she disappeared from the hallways of the institute altogether, slipping away at dawn, the front gates sighing as if they sensed her run past them.

Patrick broke the rules and sought her out, finding her in the neighborhood where she’d grown up, lingering near her house, watching the lights go on and off in the windows, pressing herself against the walls of her old life. She whispered into her mother’s dreams and laughed when her brother shivered for no reason he could think of. She was learning the tricks of staying. Patrick watched her practice, watched the way she dimmed and sharpened by turns.

The memories of his own visitations rose up in him, the hope they’d given him initially, before even that was eroded by disappointment. Each time he visited, he got nothing but distracted smiles from Jonas. And the way Jonas would pause when Patrick—always a stranger now—entered a room, as if a memory had brushed past him. Patrick saw the truth. His visits were a haunting. They kept Jonas, too, turned toward a life he could no longer fully inhabit.

“You came,” Sara said when she finally noticed Patrick watching her. There was a note of triumph in her tone. “See? There’s another way.”

“This isn’t living,” Patrick said. “It’s waiting.”

“For what?” she demanded.

“For the courage to leave,” he said. And then, because honesty had finally caught him, “I’m not judging, so don’t worry. I don’t have it either.”

They sat on the curb as the streetlights hummed awake. Patrick told her about Jonas. About the faces of strangers he always had to wear. About the bargain he’d made and had once called a mercy.

Then he made a choice he’d been avoiding since he was seventeen.

“It’s your turn now,” he said. “At the institute, I mean. You’ll have time. You’ll help people. You’ll do better than I did.”

Sara stared. “And you?”

“I guess it’ll be whatever comes next,” he said, then surprised himself by grinning. “And besides, I want to see my life whole. The design it makes in the end.”

Patrick entered the screening room alone after returning to the abandoned school on the hillside, then the lights dimmed. The film began with a boy on a hillside, the city spread bright below him. It ended with a hand on a steering wheel and love so fierce it broke the world open.

When the lights came up again, Patrick was gone.

On a day not long after, Jonas sat in the café with sunlight on the counter and felt—without knowing why—that something had finally loosened in him. He smiled at a stranger without feeling there was anything strange about it.

On the hillside above the city, where the ivy crept and the shattered windows gleamed, Sara took her seat behind a desk to learn the work of waiting.

And somewhere beyond the screen, whatever comes next continued, persistent as a river.