Then she looked in the basket, and there were still silk petals in the bottom of it, wedged under the liner where they’d been since May.

She got a handful out.

“You have to come,” she said.

“I’m coming.”

So my daughter and I walked down an empty aisle on an empty terrace on a Saturday morning in September, at whatever pace she felt like, with no music and nobody watching, and she threw silk petals on the stones as we went, and she did not run out before the end.

At the arbor she stopped and turned around and looked back up the path at the petals.