She watched Hannah take a handful from the casket, which Dorothy was holding out. Hannah pushed her upper lip against her teeth, a look of determination that Jenny recognised from her as a toddler, from twenty years of knowing her daughter.

Dorothy was last to dip her hand into the small wooden casket. She did it with care. She had a stillness about her even now, her hand full of her husband’s remains.

Jenny looked around Bruntsfield Links. Just an ordinary day for commuters along Bruntsfield Place, for students heading to university and art college, for kids mucking about on their lunch break from Gillespie’s. The elderly couple ambling along Whitehouse Loan, the dog walkers throwing tennis balls for two collies by The Golf Tavern. Heavy clumps of white cloud cruised above them, away over Arthur’s Seat to the sea. A bin lorry crunched its way along Greenhill Gardens behind them, the creak and crank of the mechanism lifting rubbish into the jaws at the back.

Jenny looked at her mum. ‘Do you want to say anything?’

Dorothy stared at the ashes in her hand. ‘I don’t know.’

Maybe there wasn’t anything to say that didn’t sound trite and contrived, anything that made a difference to grief and longing, any way to express the absence of people you love.

‘Go easy, Jim,’ Dorothy said, opening her fingers and letting the dust fall.

Jenny looked at her hand then behind at the big house. They 332were fifty yards away, so they would be looking at her dad every time they stared out of the kitchen window. Jenny thought about what had happened up there and Hannah’s chase across this piece of grass. Maybe that would always be mixed up in their minds with this, but there was no avoiding it. Everything is connected anyway.

She let her dad slip through her fingers then brushed at the remaining ashes, which were taken by a breeze into the air. She smudged a bit between forefinger and thumb then popped her thumb in her mouth and sucked it clean, tasting the bitterness.

Dorothy had told her and Hannah everything about Simon, how Archie found him in the embalming room, how her dad helped get rid of the body, how Archie eventually told Dorothy what she hoped was the truth. Hannah had listened, but still seemed in shock about her dad.

Hannah dropped her share of her grandfather onto the grass, scattering it like seeds with a shake of her hand. It’s funny how we do that, as if we’re sowing something for the future, spreading the souls of the dead far and wide.