Caldwell does not consider it a matter for negotiation whether an adult may instruct a nine-year-old child to conceal herself, and asks that all further contact cease.
It stopped that week.
Fourteen months later, one more thing arrived — a letter addressed to Hannah, sent to the attorney’s office because Pamela did not have our address any more, which she had presumably realized was itself informative.
I did not open it.
I took it to Dr.
Roshan, who read it and told me it was not harmful, and that it contained an apology and an admission — that Pamela had come to understand that her jealousy of a dead woman had turned into resentment of a child who could not defend herself — and that it did not ask for anything.
Then Dr.
Roshan said the letter should be given to Hannah, unopened, with no advice attached, and that whatever she decided to do with it was correct.
Hannah was eleven by then.
She held it for a while.
She turned it over twice.
Then she put it in the bottom drawer of her desk, still sealed.
“Maybe when I’m older,” she said.
“I don’t need her to explain it right now.”
It is still in that drawer.
She is fourteen.
I have never asked.
Part Fifteen: The Aisle
In September, four months after, the manager at Pine Crest called about a box.
There is always a box.
Every venue has a shelf of things people leave behind in the specific chaos of a day that goes wrong.
Ours had a card holder, two of Samantha’s shoes, a folder of seating charts, an engagement ring that had spent four days on a shelf next to some tablecloths, and a white flower basket.
I asked Hannah whether she wanted to drive out with me or whether she’d rather I went alone.
She thought about it overnight, which is a thing she does, and at breakfast she said she’d come.
It was a clear Saturday in the second week of September and the terrace was empty.
No chairs, no lights, no arbor decoration — just the wooden frame and the stone path and the pines going up the slope behind it, and that specific hard blue Colorado sky you get in September.
The manager gave us the box in the lobby and was decent about it and did not linger.
Hannah took the basket out and carried it out onto the terrace.
She stood at the top of the stone path where the aisle had been and looked down it for a while.
“I practiced for like a month,” she said.
“I know.
I was there for all eleven times.”
“I never got to do it.”
I stood next to her.
“Do you want to do it now?”
She looked up at me to see whether I was joking.
Then she looked in the basket, and there were still silk petals in the bottom of it, wedged under the liner where they’d been since May.
She got a handful out.
“You have to come,” she said.
“I’m coming.”
So my daughter and I walked down an empty aisle on an empty terrace on a Saturday morning in September, at whatever pace she felt like, with no music and nobody watching, and she threw silk petals on the stones as we went, and she did not run out before the end.
At the arbor she stopped and turned around and looked back up the path at the petals.
