For a minute it all spins around her, the crosses and the flower beds and the angry trees. For a minute the angles all go askew and the scent of the roses is suffocating, but then the man called Alfred is shaking his head and saying, “Harry.”

She laughs, but doesn’t know exactly why. Is it relief that she feels? “Harry was here?”

“Yes, miss. Just earlier this week.”

She has seen the barbed wire by the side of the roads, and the corrugated iron crumbling into brown dust, and has thought of Harry in a hospital bed, his chest all torn apart by that wire. She remembers the shock of seeing his pale face that day and the weight of his hand on her arm. The thought of it makes her hate the wire and want to link her arm through his again.

“I’m glad that he’s been here,” she says.

“There you are.” The gardener’s feet still and he stands square in front of a cross. He takes his hat off and touches Edie’s shoulder. “I’ll leave you with him. My condolences.”

She recalls the blue of a robin’s egg cupped in a boy’s palms. His fingers rubbing away the dirt to show her the pattern on a shard of pottery. She remembers Will’s hands stretching out toward her and showing her flints and flowers, the skull of a mouse, a pine cone, a bronze buckle caked in earth. His pockets were full of treasures and always something that he wanted to share. She remembers his endless boy’s curiosity. How did that end? How did that boy end up in this place? On his grave William Blythe is nineteen years old. Edie thinks that his grave is the saddest thing she has ever seen.

She kneels and puts her hand to the wood of Will’s cross, touching the tape that bears his name. She has an odd urge to hug his cross. She feels both overwhelming affection toward it and intense anger. How could this be that boy? There are blood-red petunias growing at the base of his grave, orange zinnias, and a black feather. That at least seems right. She would like to bring him fossils and seashells, marbles and caramels and cigarette cards, but all she can offer him today are her tears. She thinks about Harry sitting by his brother’s grave and can’t help but cry for him too.

Knowing that Harry is on this journey with her makes it feel better. She is not so alone. She is not such a fool. And yet, she can’t help but think about why Harry has taken so long to start it. Why has he been so reluctant to come here? But she checks herself: she looks around and knows exactly why. Suddenly she realizes that it perhaps wasn’t fair of her to ask him to come back.