A switch, turned off. Apart from weak moments - moments he'd been on his knees, beside shards of broken glass - Mark had always believed this. Brendan Samuel Fife, his only son, had died of bad luck; now he was gone forever. Now he was nothing.
Nothing was left of him. Brendan's body had been buried, had by now decomposed in its small coffin. He was in the black, now, an absence that couldn't be described. Mark believed this utterly: His boy was not in a heaven; he was not sleeping a dreamless sleep. He was nothing, no more present in the world than the light of a switched-off bulb.
But what if?