He was good. Dorothy would later admit that to herself when she was being honest. He knew where to pause. He knew how much emotion to show without seeming theatrical. He knew how to look down at his folded paper just long enough to gather himself before continuing.
“Colleen was the light of my life,” he said.
Soft sobs rose from the pews.
“She was generous, brave, impossible not to love. She gave everything for this family. Everything.”
Dorothy sat in the front row beside her son Fletcher, called Fletch by everyone who loved him. He had flown in from Portland at dawn, broad-shouldered and silent and carrying the kind of rage that made the air around him feel electrically unstable.
He had not spoken a full sentence since arriving.
When Grant said, “I don’t know how to do this without her,” Fletch’s jaw flexed hard.
Dorothy leaned slightly toward him. “Not here,” she murmured.
At the back of the church, a woman in black signed the guest book.
Red lipstick.
The same woman from the parking garage.
Under the line marked Relationship, she wrote: close family friend.