A grieving mother pulling at her daughter’s dress at a funeral, screaming about bruises, is a story everybody in that room already knew how to file.

What he could not do anything about was that eleven minutes earlier she had made a phone call.

Emily’s college roommate — a woman named Priya who had flown overnight from Denver and who Margaret had met perhaps six times in fifteen years — got up out of the fourth row, walked to the front, looked at Emily’s neck, and then turned around and stood next to Margaret without saying a single word.

Margaret has sent her a card every year since.

The funeral director came up the aisle, a man in his fifties with the manner of somebody who has managed several hundred difficult mornings, and Margaret said, before he could speak:

“Nobody touches her and nothing leaves this building.