Chapter 18: What the Moon Gave Her

I stood up, and Orson stood up with me, one hand on my arm.

The doctor said something about lying down, and Orson said he would in a minute.

We walked to the Stone together.

The crowd opened for us without a word.

Odile did not turn her head.

Her bare hand lay flat on the granite, and the other glove hung from her fingers.

"It's still quiet," she said.

Her voice was perfectly level.

"I stood where I was told to stand, and I waited for it."

She lifted her hand off the stone and looked at the palm.

"Nothing came."

"It couldn't," I said. "He didn't lie."

"No."

"The Moon gave mine back to me. A true choice does that, and you knew it was possible."

I held her eyes.

"You spent a month making sure it wouldn't happen."

She turned and looked down at me from the Stone.

Her face was pale and smooth and hardly lined, and every person on that green was looking at it.

"I did what I could with what I had," she said.

"You told a room of women that numb was a mercy."

"It was a mercy to me."

"It was not," said a voice from the crowd.

The woman in the green dress had walked up to the Stone.

Her chin was shaking, but she held it up.

"It was thirty years of her telling me I was lucky," she said, to the families, not to Odile.

"My husband died in my kitchen eleven months after he lied to me. I was told to be grateful for the quiet."

Nobody spoke.

"I want my name off her register," she said. "I'm not hers to elder."

The man who had said Orson was unfit took off his hat.

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