they didn’t even offer to make her a ghost bride.” “I don’t know what that is.” A short hesitation. “Oh, thank you Des. They really do that?” He turned to Nikys. “Marry people to dead people?” “Not often. It’s a sort of adoption, as much as anything. If they’d had the ceremony—it’s sometimes held at the graveside, but more often with a memori tablet—my mother would have become a daughter-in-law of the house. With certain rights of support and inheritance, among other things.
