Then, at last, she was alone. For a moment she simply couldn’t think—what did she want? What was right? Still the tears and the prayers wouldn’t come. Tentatively Shannon laid a hand on the coffin, but there was only the sensation of wood warmed by the sun, and the overly heady scent of roses.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured. “It shouldn’t have been like that between us at the end. But I don’t know how to resolve it, or to change it. And I don’t know how to say goodbye, to either of you now.”

She stared down at the headstone to her left.

Colin Alan Bodine

Beloved husband and father

Even those last words, she thought miserably, carved into granite were a lie. And her only wish, as she stood over the graves of two people she had loved all of her life, was that she had never learned the truth.

And that stubborn, selfish wish was the guilt she would live with.

Turning away, she walked alone toward the waiting car.

It seemed like hours before the crowd began to thin and the house grew quiet again. Amanda had been well loved, and those who had loved her had gathered together in her home. Shannon said her last goodbye, her last thanks, accepted her last sympathy, then finally, finally, closed the door and was alone.

Fatigue began to drag at Shannon as she wandered into her father’s office.

Amanda had changed little here in the eleven months since her husband’s sudden death. The big old desk was no longer cluttered, but she had yet to dispose of his computer, the modem, the fax and other equipment he’d used as a broker and financial adviser. His toys, he’d called them, and his wife had kept them even when she’d been able to give away his suits, his shoes, his foolish ties.

All the books remained on the shelves—tax planning, estate planning, accounting texts.

Weary, Shannon sat in the big leather chair she’d given him herself for Father’s Day five years before. He’d loved it, she remembered, running a hand over the smooth burgundy leather. Big enough to hold a horse, he’d said, and had laughed and pulled her into his lap.

She wished she could convince herself that she still felt him here. But she didn’t. She felt nothing. And that told her more than the requiem Mass, more than the cemetery, that she was alone. Really alone.

There hadn’t been enough time for anything, Shannon thought dully. If she’d known before . . . She wasn’t sure which she meant, her mother’s illness or the lies. If she’d known, she thought again, training her mind on the illness. They might have tried other things, the alternative medicines, the vitamin concentrates, all the small and simple hopes she’d read of in the books on homeopathic medicine she’d collected. There hadn’t been time to give them a chance to work.

There had been only a few weeks. Her mother had kept her illness from her, as she’d kept other things.