She walked toward the side door. The light-blue dress made a soft sound. A strap of her heel caught the carpet and she corrected without drama. From the back she could have been any woman leaving a church early, except that half the town now knew her name had been in a dead woman's mouth three days before the dying.
Emma watched her go. Then she looked at her father, and the courage went out of her face the way color goes out of a sky when a cloud takes the sun. She held the phone against her stomach.
"I didn't play it for them," she whispered. "I wouldn't do that. I just needed you to not say it yet. The vows. I needed you to wait until you heard her."
David nodded. He could not, for a moment, find a voice that belonged to a father and not to a man on a ledge. He put his arm around her. The hoodie smelled like the garage, like cold concrete and the cardboard box labeled in Claire's block letters, CABLES / MISC, which had not contained cables. It had contained the last objects Claire had not wanted in the bedroom: a phone with a dying battery, a pair of gardening gloves, a paperback swollen from being left in the rain, a cassette of a choir she liked and no machine that would play it.
They went out through the sacristy, not the aisle. Naomi followed. Helen followed more slowly, stopping to touch the pew end where Claire had sat as a girl when Helen still believed churches could be counted on for ordinary Sundays. Behind them the congregation rose in pieces. Chairs scraped. Somebody began to cry in the efficient way of a person who cries at weddings anyway. The violinist packed her instrument without looking at anyone. The roses remained. The lamb remained. In the glass, the woman at the well kept offering her jar to no one.