a hand on her shoulder. Then he looked at June.
‘What happened?’
June stared at him. ‘I called you.’
His jaw tightened. ‘This is not the time.’
‘It was the time at midnight,’ June said. ‘It was the time at one. It was the time at two. It was the time when they took her upstairs and she asked for Mom.’
Margaret sobbed harder into the blanket.
‘Nobody told us it was this serious,’ she cried.
June felt something inside her go quiet.
‘I did.’
Thomas lowered his voice. ‘You are emotional. We all are. Do not make this worse.’
June almost laughed.
Worse.
As if worse had not already happened. As if the worst thing in the room were June naming it.
The week after Eve died became a blur of arrangements and casseroles and people who said things because silence frightened them. Margaret took control of the funeral with the focus of someone planning a public event. White lilies because Eve had once said she liked them. A slideshow of childhood photos. A pale blue dress for the burial because Margaret insisted Eve looked sweet in blue.
June wanted to ask when her mother had last noticed what Eve liked.
She did not.
Not yet.
At the funeral home, Margaret stood beside the guest book and accepted hugs with red-rimmed eyes. She told people Eve had been private. She told people Eve had hidden her pain. She told people she wished her daughter had trusted her enough to say something sooner.
Every time June heard it, her nails dug deeper into her palm.
The chapel filled with neighbors, relatives, church friends, classmates, and people Eve had worked with at the bakery. They came whispering and crying, carrying memories June had never heard. One elderly customer said Eve had always drawn tiny flowers on the paper bags. A coworker said Eve saved the broken cookies for kids whose parents could not buy treats. A former teacher said Eve once stayed after class to help clean paintbrushes because she noticed the teacher looked tired.
June listened and realized that grief has a second blade. You do not only lose the person you knew. You also lose all the versions of them other people knew, the small hidden kindnesses they never got to tell you about themselves.
Then Mara arrived.
Mara had been Eve’s best friend since freshman year of high school. She wore a black dress and no makeup. Her eyes were swollen, and she held a cream-colored envelope in both hands like it might break.
She found June near the side hallway where the chapel music sounded muffled.
‘June,’ Mara whispered. ‘I need to give you this.’
June looked down.
Her name was written across the front in Eve’s careful handwriting.
June.
Underneath, in smaller letters, were words that made the hall tilt around her.
Read this only when everyone is listening.
June’s throat closed.
‘Mara, what is this?’
Mara shook her head, crying silently now. ‘She gave it to me three days before. She said she was scared something was wrong with her body, but your mom kept saying she was making it up. Eve made me promise. I thought she was just scared. I thought…’
Mara could not finish.
June held the envelope as if it were
