People visit graveyards for many reasons, and you learn, if you go often enough, to read the postures of the other mourners, the brisk practical ones tending a plot, the shattered new ones, the old ones who come to sit and talk.

This woman fit none of those shapes.

She stood the way a person stands who has come to a place they have been avoiding for a long time, braced, uncertain, half ready to flee, and she was looking at my daughter’s headstone specifically, reading the name and the dates as though confirming something.

I did not know any of that consciously in the moment.

But I felt it, the wrongness and the significance of her, and it was why I spoke to her instead of simply nodding and moving on, and everything that followed came from that single small decision to ask a stranger whether she had known my daughter. and I had never seen her before in my life.