“My aunt died. She was Olivia Trelawney’s mother. That’s where I met Bill, at that funeral. I ran out of that one, too. I was sitting behind the funeral parlor, smoking a cigarette, feeling terrible, and that’s where he found me. Do you understand?” At last she looks up at him. “He found me.”

“I get it, Holly. I do.”

“He opened a door for me. One into the world. He gave me something to do that made a difference.”

“Same here.”

She wipes her eyes almost angrily. “This is just so fracking poopy.”

“Got that right, but he wouldn’t want you to go backward. That’s the last thing he’d want.”

“I won’t,” she says. “You know he left me the company, right? The insurance money and everything else went to Allie, but the company is mine. I can’t run it by myself, so I asked Pete if he’d like to work for me. Just part-time.”

“And he said . . . ?”

“He said yes, because retirement sucked already. It should be okay. I’ll run down the skippers and deadbeats on my computer, and he’ll go out and get them. Or serve the subpoenas, if that’s the job. But it won’t be like it was. Working for Bill . . . working with Bill . . . those were the happiest days of my life.” She thinks that over. “I guess the only happy days of my life. I felt . . . I don’t know . . .”

“Valued?” Jerome suggests.

“Yes! Valued.”

“You should have felt that way,” Jerome says, “because you were very valuable. And still are.”

She gives the plant a final critical look, dusts dirt from her hands and the knees of her pants, and sits down next to him. “He was brave, wasn’t he? At the end, I mean.”

“Yes.”

“Yeah.” She smiles a little. “That’s what Bill would have said—not yes, but yeah.”

“Yeah,” he agrees.

“Jerome? Would you put your arm around me?”

He does.

“The first time I met you—when we found the stealth program Brady loaded into my cousin Olivia’s computer—I was afraid of you.”

“I know,” Jerome says.

“Not because you were black—”

“Black is whack,” Jerome says, smiling. “I think we agreed on that much right from the jump.”

“—but because you were a stranger. You were from outside. I was scared of outside people and outside things. I still am, but not as much as I was then.”

“I know.”

“I loved him,” Holly says, looking at the chrysanthemum. It is a brilliant orange-red below the gray gravestone, which bears a simple message: KERMIT WILLIAM HODGES, and, below the dates, END OF WATCH. “I loved him so much.”

“Yeah,” Jerome says. “So did I.”

She looks up at him, her face timid and hopeful—beneath the graying bangs, it is almost the face of a child. “You’ll always be my friend, won’t you?”