It had come down because a seven-year-old in a yellow dress had walked across the grass and made it impossible.

He could look at Lily and see my sharp, watchful eyes looking back at him, and he could see, unmistakable, the particular soft wave in her dark hair that had run through his family for three generations, that was in his baby pictures, that his mother had.

He could not un-see it.

His daughter was standing thirty feet away eating chocolate cake, and every sandbag he had ever stacked against the truth had just washed away at once, and he had nothing left to hold the water back.

So when I saw him start across the lawn toward the pavilion, walking like a man wading upstream, I was not surprised.