One Word Answer

Sookie Stackhouse is doing yard work with Bubba when a black limousine pulls up outside her house in Bon Temps. Mr. Cataliades has come with news about her cousin Hadley, and Sookie is asked to make a choice about what happens next.

Her answer, a single word, surprises more than one person, including the one waiting out of sight in the car. A short story in Charlaine Harris's Southern Vampire Mysteries, set between Dead as a Doornail and Definitely Dead, it first appeared in the anthology Bite (2004) and was later collected in A Touch of Dead (2009).