Pushing Daisies/Recap/S1/E09 Corpsicle

The Past
Eight-year-old Chuck unexpectedly loses her father. In the hours afterwards, Ned and his mother keep her company until her aunts can arrive to take care of her... and Chuck notices that her best friend seems strangely guilty about her father's death.

The Present
Chuck is horrified by Ned's revelation that he was (however inadvertently) responsible for her father's death, and runs out of the apartment they share. Between the crushing weight of his twenty-year-old guilt and the rejection of the woman he loves, Ned is shattered.

While Chuck hides from Ned, Emerson gets called to solve the deaths of insurance adjustors at Uber-Life Life Insurance Company, who are apparently getting killed in retribution for having rejected sick childrens' insurance claims.

One particular kid seems at the center of it. Teenaged heart patient Abner Newsome has been turned down six times for a heart transplant, and it's those particular adjustors that are dying.

Tropes

 * Cardiovascular Love: Abner Newsome.
 * Christmas Episode
 * Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon: Abner threatens a bonobo monkey with cutting its heart out with a butter knife to use for himself.
 * Homeopathic Mood Enhancers Are LSD/Mushroom Samba: Olive puts way too much mood enhancer in the aunts' pie, and Lily eats the whole thing herself. She ends up hallucinating a fruitcake turning into a crab.
 * Literally Shattered Lives
 * Sarcastic Confession: Chuck tells Olive that she's dead and that Ned brought her back to life. Olive obviously dismisses it.
 * Secret Keeper: Olive hides Chuck from Ned while Chuck processes the fact that Ned killed her father.
 * Stalker with a Crush: Oscar comes back, obsessed with Chuck and Digby's deathly scent.
 * Wham! Episode / Nothing Is the Same Anymore: And how! Ned tells Chuck about his role in her father's death. Emerson reveals that he has a missing daughter. Lily reveals that she is really Chuck's mother.