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the day would be full of tears. Seth reached over and placed his arm around both of them. As Kite watched Jimmy take a deep breath to speak she found herself standing
up, pushing past Seth and walking to the front of the chapel to sit next to Hazel. It felt wrong that she should be sitting there alone. Hazel turned to Kite with a look of utter confusion and
emptiness. Her hollow cheeks were stained with tears and her nose was streaming, but she didn’t seem to notice. As Jimmy began to speak Kite reached for Hazel’s hand, but Hazel did not
register her touch. The tips of her fingers were ice cold. It was as if something inside her had died too.
    ‘Our daughter . . .’ Jimmy paused and coughed as he struggled to speak her name.
    ‘Our daughter, Dawn Melissa Jenkins, was our pride and our joy.’ He held up what looked like a long handwritten speech, but the tears fell heavily from his eyes and dripped on to the
paper. He stared at the bare coffin and the paper floated to the ground. He stood in silence for a moment while he collected himself and looked out over the mourners at the round stained glass
window at the far end of the chapel. Kite followed his eyes to the grim image of Christ’s crucifixion on a wooden cross. ‘She was our hope and our happiness.’ He bent down and
picked up the piece of paper. ‘I wrote this speech about what she meant to us. I’m sorry, I’ve got no heart to read it now, but Miss Choulty, Dawn’s teacher, has a few words
she wants to say.’ Jimmy bowed his head and walked back to his seat. As he sat down he nodded at Kite as if to say thank you for sitting with Hazel.
    Miss Choulty was wearing a neat navy-blue suit. Her St Christopher glinted around her neck as she opened a little notebook and began to speak. Her familiar voice blurred into a strain of
sadness. Kite did not hear the individual words that she spoke except for when she said how full of ‘potential’ Dawn had been. At this, Hazel let out a cry so strange and deep that Miss
Choulty stopped and lost her place in her speech, leaving the whole congregation flailing around in silence. She uttered a few more words and returned to her seat. There were hymns; ‘All
Things Bright and Beautiful’ was the only one Kite recognized. The organ seemed to play a beat behind the congregation as if it was dragging a heavy load uphill. Nobody sang with much
enthusiasm. Jimmy, Hazel and Kite remained silent.
    After the priest had said a few words about the ‘tragic circumstances of this loss for family, school and community’ and how Dawn would be ‘welcomed into the Kingdom of Heaven
like a Lamb of God’, and after people had muttered their ‘Amens’, everyone followed the coffin bearers out to the patch of ground that had been prepared for Dawn. Kite peered down
into the deep hole that had been dug where now a murky pool of water was forming. Jimmy followed Kite’s gaze into the hole and as he did two great tears rolled down his face and dropped into
the filthy mud puddle. Jimmy and Hazel clung together, holding each other up. Hazel’s face was still blank, as if her kind, lively spirit had flown out of her. Kite recognized something of
how she herself felt mirrored in Hazel’s eyes.
    ‘You can’t let her go into that hole,’ Kite called out suddenly. Seth and Ruby stood on either side of her, holding her close and steady, but as the young priest committed
Dawn’s body to the earth and talked of ‘walking through the valley of death and fearing no evil’, his own strength seemed to falter. He nodded at Kite briefly and took a deep
breath before continuing.
    After the ceremony was over he sought her out.
    ‘That was my first funeral,’ he explained.
    ‘Mine too,’ Kite whispered back.
    ‘So hard to bury someone this young.’ Kite sensed that he was trying to coax her into talking.
    ‘Do you have faith?’ he continued.
    Kite shrugged. She thought of Miss Choulty’s St Christopher and Grandma