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responded as some part of her brain followed the rite.
    But she felt neither comforted nor eased nor inspired.
    The scene wasn’t dreamlike, but all too real. The black-garbed priest with his beautiful baritone, thedozens and dozens of mourners, the brilliant stream of sunlight that glinted off the brass handles of the coffin that was cloaked in flowers. The sound of weeping, the chirp of birds.
    She was burying her mother.
    Beside the fresh grave was the neatly tended mound of another, and the headstone, still brutally new, of the man she had believed all of her life to be her father.
    She was supposed to cry. But she’d already wept.
    She was supposed to pray. But the prayers wouldn’t come.
    Standing there, with the priest’s voice ringing in the clear spring air, Shannon could only see herself again, walking into the parlor, the anger still hot inside her.
    She’d thought her mother had been sleeping. But there had been too many questions, too many demands racing in her head to wait, and she’d decided to wake her.
    Gently, she remembered. Thank God she had at least been gentle. But her mother hadn’t awakened, hadn’t stirred.
    The rest had been panic. Not so gentle now—the shaking, the shouting, the pleading. And the few minutes of blankness, blessedly brief, that she knew now had been helpless hysteria.
    There’d been the frantic call for an ambulance, the endless, terrifying ride to the hospital. And the wait, always the wait.
    Now the waiting was over. Amanda had slipped into a coma, and from a coma into death.
    And from death, so said the priest, into eternal life.
    They told her it was a blessing. The doctor had said so, and the nurses who had been unfailingly kind. The friends and neighbors who had called had all said it was a blessing. There had been no pain, no suffering in thoselast forty-eight hours. She had simply slept while her body and brain had shut down.
    Only the living suffered, Shannon thought now. Only they were riddled with guilt and regrets and unanswered questions.
    â€œShe’s with Colin now,” someone murmured.
    Shannon blinked herself back, and saw that it was done. People were already turning toward her. She would have to accept their sympathies, their comforts, their own sorrows, as she had at the funeral parlor viewing.
    Many would come back to the house, of course. She had prepared for that, had handled all the details. After all, she thought as she mechanically accepted and responded to those who walked to her, details were what she did best.
    The funeral arrangements had been handled neatly and without fuss. Her mother would have wanted the simple, she knew, and Shannon had done her best to accommodate Amanda on this last duty. The simple coffin, the right flowers and music, the solemn Catholic ceremony.
    And the food, of course. It seemed faintly awful to have such a thing catered, but she simply hadn’t had the time or the energy to prepare a meal for the friends and neighbors who would come to the house from the cemetery.
    Then, at last, she was alone. For a moment she simply couldn’t think—what did she want? What was right? Still the tears and the prayers wouldn’t come. Tentatively Shannon laid a hand on the coffin, but there was only the sensation of wood warmed by the sun, and the overly heady scent of roses.
    â€œI’m sorry,” she murmured. “It shouldn’t have been like that between us at the end. But I don’t know how toresolve it, or to change it. And I don’t know how to say goodbye, to either of you now.”
    She stared down at the headstone to her left.
    Â 
    Colin Alan Bodine
    Beloved husband and father
    Â 
    Even those last words, she thought miserably, carved into granite were a lie. And her only wish, as she stood over the graves of two people she had loved all of her life, was that she had never learned the truth.
    And that stubborn, selfish wish was the guilt she would live