The Names I Woke With

Bram clears out the flats of the dead. Twelve years of it, in the rain, in Antwerp. He prices what a life left behind, carries the rest down to the van, and he has got very good at not looking at any of it.Then he wakes with three names written into his chest in a careful hand he does not know.A woman. Her daughter. A child who did not live out her first year. All of them drowned four hundred years ago in a valley that is under a lake now. None of them gone.No tattooist will touch the marks. A doctor leans a foot from them and sees clean skin. Then an old man at a door down on the docks tells Bram what he has become, and who has been carrying that family through the centuries, hand to hand, so they would not go out.The last pair of hands belonged to a stranger in a bar. Now they are Bram's, and nobody asked him.The one person who believes him is a nurse who has sat with more dying people than he has cleared flats.There are things in this city that hunt a man who shines. One of them is already on the stairs. It is in no hurry at all, and it is kind.The Names I Woke With is the first book of The Borrowed Dead, a trilogy about grief, the work nobody thanks you for, and how far an ordinary man will go for people he never met.