So when I stepped out of that SUV onto their gravel, I was not steeling myself.

There was nothing left to steel against.

I was just a woman in a uniform she had earned, come to bury a kind old man and to say, at last, a true thing out loud.

Chapter 2 — Five Faces

Then the back doors opened, and one by one my five children climbed down onto the gravel.

Gavin first, my oldest, tall for his age and careful, the way oldest children of single mothers are always careful.

Then Mason, then Lucas, then Clara reaching for her brother’s hand, then little Audrey, the last, blinking up at the grey sky.

And the whispers began at once, moving through the gathered mourners like wind through wheat, because it did not take a careful eye to see the thing that was standing on that driveway.

Five children.

Five faces.

And every one of them, from Gavin’s careful jaw to Audrey’s blinking blue eyes, was a small unmistakable copy of Garrett Remington.

I heard it start behind the black umbrellas. Is that Jacqueline?

Whose children are those? And then, lower, sharper, the one that mattered: Look at the boy’s face.

Look at all of them.