It was important to me that he know his mother as a presence in his life even though he had never met her, that he grow up talking to her, bringing her things, keeping her real.

That day he had made her a card at the kitchen table, an elaborate thing covered in bright crayon drawings, and when we got to the grave he realized he had left it in the car, and he trotted back across the grass to get it, leaving me alone for a moment by the headstone.

And that was when I noticed the woman.

She was standing a few feet from Chloe’s grave, a stranger in a wool coat, looking down at the granite with an expression I could not read, something in the set of her shoulders told me she was not a casual visitor.