Paid to Cry

Frankie Vane is the best professional mourner in the business — paid to weep, convincingly, at the funerals of strangers who'd otherwise go into the ground unwept. She's extraordinary at it, for one simple reason: she hasn't felt a thing in twelve years.

Then her agency launches a service grieving people before they die, and hands Frankie a stack of pre-booked funerals. The fourth file is her own estranged, dying father's. He has paid, in advance, for a room full of strangers to mourn him — and left one instruction: his daughter must never be told, and never be sent.

So she goes anyway. Under a false name. Telling herself it's just research.

What begins as the strangest job of her career becomes the first honest thing her family has managed in twelve years — a reckoning with grief, performance, and the last kindness a stranger can do you. Paid to Cry will make you laugh out loud, and then, somewhere near the end, it will catch you. Full room. Front row. No tissue.

Graham Miranda writes novels and nonfiction that share one trait: a quiet suspicion of the easy answer. Paid to Cry began as a short story about a stranger at a funeral and grew into a novel about what we owe people who can no longer pay us back. He works independently and publishes on Amazon Kindle.