He stepped back, clearing his throat, embarrassed. How many ways did he need to be shown that this woman did not want him here? Well, he should be grateful. What a good reminder. He needed to turn around and walk down the cherub-surveilled hallway and get back to fucking work.

“No, wait,” she said, stopping him. “I’m sorry. I meant—um. Because of what you told me. About being an . . .” She trailed off, obviously uncomfortable saying the word he’d basically grenaded at her the other night. She switched the flower crown to her other hand, shaking loose some of its petals in the process. “It’s not the same . . . losing a grandmother, I mean.”

He stilled, relaxing his posture. So it wasn’t that she didn’t want him there, at least not for now. He still should go; he still should get back to work.

But he didn’t go. He leaned a shoulder against the wall, right at one end of the line of mailboxes, and tucked his hands in his pockets. He thought about that tear he suspected she’d been wiping away, and he could not for the life of him bring himself to turn around and go back to Donny’s place.

“I don’t really think grief cares so much about titles. It sounds like you were close.”

She tipped her chin down in a nod. “She was ninety-two years old. It’s really . . . I’m fine, you know? She had a good, long life, and she wasn’t well, right there at the end. So it’s . . .”

She trailed off again, and then she gave a shrug that was so, so familiar to him. He’d given that shrug to people for what had felt like his whole entire seventeenth year of life. He’d been sick for a while, he remembered saying to people. It’s good he doesn’t have to suffer anymore, he remembered people saying to him.

“It’s still awful,” he said. “No matter what way it happens. No matter when.” He thought of the poem she’d read. Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Now that, he thought, was a sad poem.

She nodded, and then she moved to the side, mimicking his posture—leaning a shoulder against the wall, right at the other end of the line of mailboxes. She didn’t smile, and he breathed a sigh of relief.

“Probably I shouldn’t have said ‘orphan,’ before,” he said, honoring this unsmiling honesty with an offering of his own. “My dad passed when I was seventeen, my mom about a year later. I was an adult by then.”

She looked at him for a long time. “That’s not . . . really an adult.”

What was there to do, except offer that trusty, shared shrug? “Adult enough,” he added, and then he promptly changed the subject. “Jonah said you and your grandmother used to read together at these things.”