Eleanor’s mouth thinned. “Your father thought if he stayed polite enough, no one could accuse him of cowardice.”
Michael almost answered, That sounds true too, but another thought interrupted him.
For months, maybe years, he had allowed the conflict to remain focused on legitimacy, because legitimacy has rules and papers and the possibility of verdict. Underneath legitimacy lay grief in its less manageable forms: jealousy, humiliation, gratitude, old love, unfinished anger, and the terrible fact that one man can belong differently to different women without ever fully deserving either. If they kept arguing over titles, they would never get to the real wound.
He stood up. “Come back to the grave with me,” he said.
Neither woman moved immediately.
“Please,” he added. “Not to agree. Just to stop doing this from opposite sides.”
June rose first. Eleanor rose more slowly. Together they walked back across the grass toward Section C, not arm in arm, not reconciled, but no longer performing for the rows of strangers. Michael walked between and slightly behind them like a man escorting history to a site where no version of it would fit cleanly.
Thomas’s grave looked smaller from a distance than it had from inside the fight.