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The problem with being dead is that no one forwards your mail.

I only check my email in coffee shops. This shop isn’t busy, but the barista looks relieved when I order decaf coffee instead of their advertised ombre milkshakes. According to the holographic menu, the milkshakes change color corresponding to the drinker’s personality. Two young girls occupy a nearby table, holding milkshakes in transparent to-go cups. One girl checks a chart, trying to decipher what her drink says about her life. The other sips from her straw and grimaces in distaste.

“What is that flavor?” she asks, scrunching her nose. She must be about eleven.

“It’s supposed to be a mystery.” The other girl traces a finger down her chart. “How does it change color, you think?”

“Heat-activated dyes,” I reply before I can help myself. The two girls look at me, then at their milkshakes. Sure enough, the warmth of their fingers has made the dyes shift in hue. Depending on how hot or cold a person runs, their milkshake can remain a muted violet or bloom into hot pink. The drinks remind me of those old vintage mood rings from the twentieth century.

That’s the thing about people—we cannot move through the world and leave it unchanged. No matter how much we want to.

I’m not a caffeine enthusiast, but coffee shops are great for hiding one’s IP address. If anyone tries to trace my activities, they will be led here. And A Whole Latte Fun’s security cameras are broken, the two employees look tired, and the only online security is a lock to keep customers from streaming adult websites.

I have no interest in porn. Rather, I’m hacking the email of an eighty-five-year-old woman.

Okay, that sounds worse than it is. You can’t call it “hacking” when the password is my grandmother’s birthday and her childhood nickname.

“Come on, Nonna,” I murmur. “At least make this difficult.”

The inbox appears in the air before me, projected onto the opaque glass of my visor. Only I can see it. There was once a time when people tried to obscure screens with cupped fingers. Thankfully, we’ve moved beyond that. A smart-ring on my right middle finger allows me to control my visor’s augmented reality.

My gaze sweeps across the coffee shop to make sure no one is watching me. At six in the evening, the place isn’t busy. To my left are two college boys wearing university sweatshirts. They’ve finished their coffees and a forgotten vanilla-glazed doughnut and glass of water sit on their table. A mom with two kids hanging from her legs orders a triple espresso, holding out her hand so the barista can scan her tattoo for payment. No one is watching me, and I turn my attention to the inbox.

With a flick of my fingers, I scroll through Nonna’s emails. There are the usual reminders for doctor’s appointments, the correspondence with her book club, and a glut of spam that has slithered past her filters.

I delete the spam for her. There are at least two scams in there—a sketchy address posing as a bank and another promising a brand-new business opportunity that just needs a credit card and—

All it takes is a swipe of my fingers to copy down those email addresses and save them to a folder in my visor. I’ll pass them off to Prefect later.

Once I’ve read through Nonna’s emails—don’t judge me, the most private thing was her complaining about how her robot vacuum keeps getting stuck under her dining room chairs—I scroll down to a familiar folder. It was set up three years ago. The contents are forwarded from a different email. A dead person’s.

Mine.

When someone dies, digital ghosts linger. Social media accounts have to be shut down, newsletters unsubscribed from, DMs and inboxes cleared out. To spare my parents additional grief, my grandmother offered to have my emails forwarded to her. And like a masochist, I check them every time I hack into Nonna’s inbox.

Mostly because my sisters still email me.

At first, I wondered why they did it. Emailing a dead person seems rather morbid. From what I can figure out, it started as a therapy exercise. But over the years, it transformed into something like a diary entry. It was my sisters’ way of talking to themselves while pretending to talk to me.

I suspect neither of my siblings knows Nonna gets those emails. Otherwise they’d leave out all the details of when they sneak out of the house for parties and various romantic meetups. Knowing Nonna, she is greatly amused.

I don’t dare log in to my own email account. The Identity Security Division would see that. But using various coffee shops to hack into Nonna’s account is just anonymous enough to fly under the radar. She isn’t technically bound to me by blood or paperwork. Nonna was my grandfather’s second love—and while they were together for thirty years, they never married.

This inbox is my one point of connection with my loved ones. The stray thread that links me to my old life. And I can’t bear to cut it.

I open the folder and see a bolded, new message at the top. My youngest sister emailed a week ago and Nonna has yet to read it.

I flick the email open.

Hey.

I took my driver’s test last week. Passed, even if I was shaking the whole time.

Wanted to make you proud.

I miss you.

I can almost hear my sister’s voice in every word. She was twelve when I last saw her, with a wide smile and a wicked sense of humor. We declared the attic sovereign territory and waged war on our older sister—who responded by stealing our bras and tossing them onto the roof.

When I think of home, that is what I remember best—me and my sisters, snarling at one another and loving in equal turns, full of fondness and resentment and small joys. We weren’t perfect, but the more time I spend away from them, the more I only remember the good things. Like sea glass—all the sharp edges are gone from my memories, leaving only soft beauty.


Copyright © 2026 by Emily Lloyd-Jones