Summer has fled. It’s cold in the garden, where Lily sits on the wall of a flower bed, the bricks scratching at her legs; she’s still wearing the floral-print dress that she wore the day before. It is still the day before, the dawn only just beginning to break through the apple tree. A breeze sweeps through the house front to back, blowing away the ash and the smoke and the smell. Cleaning away Edna. On it are carried the various strangers that seem drawn to this disaster: men in white plastic suits that look like spacemen; young girls not much older than Oscar, sporting uniforms that are supposed to make them look respectable; bleary-eyed, unshaven men who fail to hide the fact they’ve been wakened from pleasant dreams in order to share her tragedy. Flies to a corpse, isn’t that the expression?

The role of the young Indian girl seems to be to offer comfort and tea. But the comfort consists of meaningless words spoken in whispers, and the tea has grown tepid in Lily’s hands. The girl does her best, but what is there to be said on occasions such as these? To her, what is Edna but another old woman gone the way of old things? At least she’s quietly spoken, though. Unlike some of the others who shout and tear their way through the cottage. One of the men in white suits, a tall, loud, thin man with a space-age silver suitcase, stubs out his cigarette on the patio and shouts, “In here, is it?” apparently under the impression he’s here to shift a piano. Even after he has gone the cigarette butt remains, giving off wisps of pungent smoke. Lily shivers.

Dawn arrives in earnest, and the morning light begins to force the garden shadows into retreat. The birds begin chirping their morning chorus. The world has decided to continue. Her-Next-Door puts her head over the fence to see what all the fuss is about. She’s still wearing her nightgown, her hair in curlers. Lily straightens and tries to assume a face for visitors, but the woman withdraws again quickly.

She’ll have to get used to that, she realizes, contaminated as she now is. They’ll avoid her in the street just like they did after Gerald . . . disappeared. At least then she had Edna, though; this time she’s on her own. She wants to close the cottage doors, stop the house from bleeding Edna out.

One of the men from the ambulance comes up to her and says, “We’re going to move her now.”

Lily gets up. Do they need her permission?