He lowered the papers to his side, and he did not offer them back to me, and his knuckles were white around the envelope, and behind him his father’s coffin waited over the open grave — and I understood that I had, without ever intending it, forced this man to begin grieving two losses on the same grey morning.

I had not come for that.

I had come for Theodore.

So I gathered my children, and we walked past Garrett and past the ashen woman beside him, up to the flower-covered grave of the one Remington who had been kind to me, and we stood there, the six of us, and said goodbye to the grandfather my children had never met and I had never stopped being grateful for.

I told them about him there, quietly, at the graveside, while the crowd stood back and let us have our moment because they no longer dared do anything else.