Chapter 16: The Wrong Stone

Elena's POV

Margot walked straight past the stone.

She came up the path with the lilies held in front of her and the photographer two steps behind.

Her eyes moved along the second row, then the fifth.

She was looking for something.

Maxim rose to his feet beside me.

"Maxim," Margot called, in a voice made for the camera. "I came to be with her. I know you wouldn't want me here."

She stopped at a small gray stone in the fifth row, under a spruce, and knelt in her cream coat.

The photographer raised the lens.

I read the name on the stone.

It belonged to a man who had died in 1974.

"Margot," Maxim said, not loudly. "Third row. Under the maple."

She didn't look up.

"Six years," he said. "You have never once found it."

The photographer lowered his camera.

He looked at the stone she was kneeling by.

Then he looked at the one I had my hand on.

"Ma'am," he said slowly, "you told me this was your daughter's grave."

"I'm very emotional," Margot said.

"The date on this one is 1974."

"She was born on the twelfth of December," I said. "Say it, Margot. Tell him her birthday."

Margot's mouth opened.

"The eleventh," she said, and the word hung in the cold. "The eleventh. No, the twelfth, I..."

He put the lens cap on, nodded to Maxim and walked back to the gate.

Margot got to her feet and brushed the knees of her coat.

When she turned, her face had set into something I had only half seen before, small and flat and very tired.

"I lost her too," she said.

"You left a week after," Maxim said. "I stayed."

"Somebody had to be able to breathe."

"Margot, go home."

She looked at him for a long moment.

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