Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead

Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead Plot Summary

Introduction

Gilda sits in her broken-down car at a green light, staring at the beige minivan that just rear-ended her. Coffee scalds her chest from her exploded thermos, and airbag dust coats her face like ash from a crematorium. The woman who hit her pounds on the window, screaming about whether Gilda is dead. It's a question that seems increasingly relevant these days. At twenty-seven, Gilda has mastered the art of being alive while feeling dead inside. Her days blur together in a haze of panic attacks, emergency room visits, and an overwhelming fixation on mortality that makes simple conversations feel impossible. When she accidentally stumbles into a job at St. Rigobert's Catholic Church—despite being an atheist lesbian—she thinks she's found the perfect hiding place. But the mysterious death of her predecessor Grace pulls her into a web of secrets that forces her to confront not just the reality of death, but the terrifying possibility of actually living.

Chapter 1: The Accidental Impostor: A Collision with Faith

The advertisement promised free mental health support, but Gilda finds herself standing before St. Rigobert's Catholic Church, a gothic fortress of stone and guilt. The priest who emerges is Father Jeff, a gentle seventy-two-year-old man who mistakes her desperate presence for divine calling. Before she can correct him, she's hired as the church secretary, replacing Grace Moppet who "was taken by the Lord last month." Gilda's first day is a masterclass in improvisation. She doesn't know the prayers, can't genuflect without looking like she's having a seizure, and nearly faints during her first mass when the congregation recites responses she's never heard. But Jeff's kindness disarms her. He treats her like a blessing, praising her computer skills when she manages to turn on the ancient desktop, marveling at her ability to build a basic website as if she's performed a miracle. The church regulars embrace her with the enthusiasm of people starved for young blood. Barney, the sweating accountant with questionable hygiene, sits too close and regales her with stories of his deceased wife. Sister Jude teaches her to untangle rosaries with the patience of someone who's spent decades unknotting the spiritual messes of others. Even the ancient parishioners, weathered by decades of Sunday mornings, smile at her with genuine warmth. But Grace's desk holds secrets. Every drawer contains traces of a life interrupted: an unfinished crossword puzzle, half a pack of gum, a romance novel bookmarked in the middle. The nameplate reads "Grace Moppet" in fading gold letters, and Gilda finds herself staring at it until the letters blur, wondering what kind of person Grace was and why she had to die just as Gilda needed somewhere to hide.

Chapter 2: Masquerades and Medications: The Art of Pretending

Playing Catholic proves surprisingly exhausting. Gilda memorizes prayers on her phone, practices genuflecting in her apartment, and develops elaborate excuses for why she can't attend confession. Meanwhile, her real life crumbles with methodical precision. Dishes pile up in her bedroom until they form architectural monuments to her depression. She sleeps through alarms, forgets to eat, and conducts entire conversations while floating outside her body like a detached observer. Eleanor enters her life through a dating app, initially suspected of being a scam artist because she asks too many security questions. But Eleanor talks about space and dark matter and Machine Elves you see on DMT, topics that make Gilda feel less alone in her existential terror. Their first date at a natural history museum becomes a revelation—standing before dinosaur bones, Gilda realizes she's met someone who doesn't find her obsession with mortality tedious. The relationship blooms in stolen moments between Gilda's elaborate deceptions. She can't tell Eleanor where she works, can't explain why she seems perpetually anxious, can't admit that she sometimes stares at her own hands for hours wondering how they'll look when she's dead. Eleanor gives her a box of Thin Mints, remembering an offhand comment about cookies, and the gesture breaks something inside Gilda. The kindness feels simultaneously precious and devastating, like being handed flowers while falling into an abyss. Her family provides no refuge. Her parents, still reeling from her unemployment at the bookstore, ask probing questions about her mysterious new job while studiously ignoring her brother Eli's escalating alcoholism. Dinner conversations become minefields where any mention of therapy or mental health gets shot down with the efficiency of air defense systems. Gilda watches Eli drink himself into oblivion while her parents discuss the neighbor's hoarding problem with the detached fascination of anthropologists.

Chapter 3: Grace's Ghost: The Mystery of the Missing Secretary

The church email account becomes Gilda's portal into Grace's world. Hundreds of messages reveal a woman who forwarded funny hamster videos, shared recipes for Turkish delight, and maintained a decades-long correspondence with her friend Rosemary. The emails pulse with life: Grace screaming at strangers who look like Rosemary's dead husband, Grace forgetting birthdays and apologizing with eternal birthday wishes, Grace worried about her memory while still dispensing comfort to grieving families. Then Rosemary's messages start arriving, addressed to her dead friend. She shares family reunion photos, updates about her dieting cat Lou, memories of drive-in theaters and department stores that no longer exist. Each email is a small knife twisted in Gilda's chest because Rosemary doesn't know she's writing to a ghost. Gilda faces an impossible choice: shatter an old woman's world or become complicit in a cruel deception. She chooses deception, crafting responses as Grace's digital specter. The lies come easier than expected, perhaps because pretending to be someone else has become her primary skill. She asks Rosemary where a lost cat might hide, hoping it might help her find Mittens, the gray cat whose "LOST" poster haunts her daily walks. She expresses concern about Rosemary's grief, offers comfort about her husband Jim's death, maintains the fiction that Grace's loving presence continues. But the weight of inhabiting a dead woman's life begins crushing her. Grace's ring sits on Jeff's finger, worn "to remember her," and Gilda finds herself studying it suspiciously. Grace's unfinished crossword puzzle becomes a monument to interrupted time. Grace's romance novel, forever bookmarked in the middle, represents all the stories that end before their conclusion. Gilda realizes she's not just lying to Rosemary—she's living in a tomb, surrounded by the artifacts of someone else's extinguished existence.

Chapter 4: Fragmentation: Disconnection in a Connected World

The news arrives like a second collision: Grace might have been murdered. Officer Parks, a muscular woman who reminds Gilda unsettlingly of an ex-girlfriend, explains that Grace's toxicology report showed suspicious levels of drugs she couldn't have obtained legitimately. A nurse named Laurie Damon has confessed to killing elderly patients, claiming Grace as one of her victims. Gilda watches Jeff weep with the helpless fury of someone who's spent his life believing in divine justice, only to discover that evil sometimes wears scrubs and calls itself mercy. Barney transforms from bumbling accountant to amateur detective, purchasing books on catching murderers and developing theories about criminal psychology. The church becomes a fortress of suspicion where every parishioner could be hiding murderous intent. Meanwhile, Gilda's relationship with Eleanor fractures under the weight of her deceptions. She can't explain why she won't reply to texts, can't reveal where she works, can't admit that she's dating Giuseppe—a life coach with the intellectual depth of a puddle who calls her nightly to share wisdom about manifesting success. Giuseppe represents everything Gilda despises: toxic positivity, spiritual bypassing, the cruel optimism of someone who's never truly suffered. But maintaining her Catholic facade requires her to date men, so she endures his calls while fantasizing about Eleanor's laugh. The masquerade reaches its breaking point when Giuseppe's sister-in-law arranges their meeting at the church. Giuseppe arrives during a funeral, wearing too-tight clothes and reeking of desperation disguised as confidence. He kisses Gilda's cheek with the presumption of ownership, introducing her to his mother while Gilda's skin crawls with revulsion. The collision between her fake heterosexual life and her genuine grief creates a vertigo that leaves her clinging to pew backs like a drunk person navigating a tilting ship.

Chapter 5: Interrogations: When the Truth Becomes Suspect

The police station feels like purgatory designed by bureaucrats: gray walls, fluorescent lighting, and the persistent tick of a clock that measures out Gilda's remaining freedom. Officer Parks suspects her involvement in Grace's death, pointing out the suspicious coincidences—Gilda's car accident that she never reported, her mysterious presence at a Catholic church despite being openly gay, her pattern of hospital visits that suggest either hypochondria or guilt. Gilda's family becomes collateral damage in the investigation. Her parents receive calls from police asking about their adult daughter's mental state, her relationship with elderly women, her capacity for violence. The questions reveal the extent of Gilda's deceptions: they didn't know she worked for a church, didn't realize she'd been visiting emergency rooms weekly, didn't understand that their daughter might be genuinely unstable rather than merely dramatic. The interrogation rooms become theaters of miscommunication. Gilda's anxiety manifests as suspicious behavior—stuttering, fidgeting, breathing irregularly. Her honest confusion about her own mental state sounds like calculated evasion. When she admits she sometimes can't remember entire days, the officers exchange meaningful glances. When she confesses to feeling detached from her own body, they lean forward with predatory interest. Barney's attempted break-in report adds another layer of suspicion. He describes a young woman skulking around his house, and Gilda realizes her amateur detective work has made her a suspect in multiple crimes. The investigation reveals the electronic trails of her deception: inappropriate tweets liked by the church's Twitter account, browser histories filled with searches about Grace and murder methods, emails to Rosemary that prove she's been impersonating a dead woman for months.

Chapter 6: Confessions: The Liberation of Honesty

The jail cell becomes Gilda's monastery, a concrete space for contemplating the wreckage of her choices. She shares her confinement with a single ant, watching it search for food with the same desperate persistence she's brought to searching for meaning. The ant becomes her confessor, receiving admissions she's never made to humans: that she's a terrible pet owner, friend, daughter, that she hoards pain like other people collect stamps. Her phone calls become final performances, voice messages to everyone she's deceived. She confesses to Jeff about being an atheist lesbian who stumbled into his church looking for therapy, not salvation. She admits to Giuseppe that she's been lying about her sexuality while criticizing his toxic positivity from a position of intellectual superiority she doesn't deserve. She tells Eleanor about her genuine feelings, about how the gift of Thin Mints broke her heart with its simple kindness. The calls to her family carry deeper confessions. She tells her parents about pretending the street was an ocean, about lying down in traffic as a child, about understanding their need to deny Eli's alcoholism while simultaneously recognizing its destructive power. She begs Eli to stop drinking, to be whoever he wants to be, to remember that they're all just ghosts in skeleton suits floating on a rock through space. But the most devastating confession comes through Rosemary, who arrives at the police station wearing a pink cat-themed shirt and mauve lipstick. The old woman has traveled hours to meet the person who's been impersonating her dead friend, and Gilda expects rage, betrayal, legal consequences. Instead, Rosemary touches her hand and says Grace would have found the whole situation hilarious. The forgiveness arrives like grace itself, unearned and transformative.

Chapter 7: Resurrection: Finding Mittens and Other Small Mercies

Grace's suicide note, hidden in a romance novel like a pressed flower, liberates Gilda from suspicion but not from understanding. The letter reveals a woman who chose her own ending rather than enduring deterioration, who left messages for strangers because she knew what it felt like to search used bookstores hoping for words from her own dead mother. Grace's death wasn't murder but mercy, a final act of autonomy in a life well-lived. The revelation about Laurie Damon, the nurse who helped terminal patients end their suffering, recontextualizes everything. She offered honesty instead of euphemisms, dignity instead of prolonged agony, choice instead of institutional abandonment. Her confession sparks debates about assisted dying, about the difference between killing and allowing death, about who gets to decide when suffering becomes unbearable. But for Gilda, the real resurrection comes in smaller moments. Eleanor forgives her deceptions with the weary patience of someone who recognizes damaged goods and chooses love anyway. Jeff accepts her confession with the grace of a man whose faith survives even the collision with reality. Barney changes his calendar from February to the current month, finally acknowledging that his wife won't be coming back to manage such domestic details. The discovery of Mittens under her apartment steps provides the story's most literal resurrection. The gray cat emerges from his hiding place covered in dirt and burrs but alive, having survived the fire that destroyed his home months earlier. His rescue becomes a metaphor for Gilda's own emergence from the wreckage of her deceptions, dirty and traumatized but breathing.

Summary

Gilda's journey through the labyrinth of deception and depression ultimately leads not to answers but to a different set of questions. She learns that Grace chose death with the same deliberation others choose life, that Rosemary's forgiveness can arrive wrapped in a pink cat shirt, that sometimes the most profound kindness comes from strangers who see through your lies and love you anyway. The church that began as her hiding place becomes her confessional, the job that started as deception becomes a lesson in grace, and the investigation that threatened her freedom becomes an opportunity for genuine self-examination. In the end, Gilda discovers that the silence she feared—the absence of meaning in a universe that will someday swallow all human endeavor—might actually be spacious enough to hold both despair and hope. She remains haunted by mortality, still struggles with dishes piling up like archaeological layers of depression, still floats outside her body when anxiety overwhelms her nervous system. But she also learns to answer the phone when Eleanor calls, to pet the rescued cat without fearing his eventual death, to exist in the space between the certainty of ending and the possibility of beginning again. The echo of mortality that once terrorized her transforms into something approaching music, a rhythm she can live with even if she cannot escape.

About Author

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Emily R. Austin

Austin reframes complex social themes through the lens of humor and compassion, aiming to empower marginalized voices. Her work delves into queer identity and critiques religious intolerance, using wit and sharp social observation. In her poetry collection "Gay Girl Prayers", she reclaims biblical verses to empower queer people and women, showcasing her ability to blend personal experience with literary exploration. Moreover, her novels, such as "Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead" and "Interesting Facts About Space", extend this approach by examining themes of social isolation and anxiety, drawing from her personal journey with partial blindness. \n\nReaders benefit from Austin’s insightful examination of human complexity and her critique of societal norms. Her narrative style not only entertains but also provokes thought, encouraging readers to question and empathize with diverse perspectives. For instance, her debut book was recognized with nominations for prestigious awards like the 2022 Amazon.ca First Novel Award, reflecting its impact. Meanwhile, her writing grants from the Canada Council for the Arts underline the cultural and literary significance of her work. This short bio encapsulates a contemporary author whose engaging storytelling fosters understanding and dialogue on critical issues.

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