Page 106 of Cruel Kiss

There's a little tent set up over the hole they dug, green canvas, folding chairs underneath.

A hearse. A man in a black suit from the funeral home standing off to the side with his hands folded, waiting.

There aren't many people.

Todd used to fill rooms. He had that big handshake and that big laugh and he could work a party until he was the only thing anybody remembered. And now, there are maybe thirty people standing on wet grass to see him into the ground. Half of them are here for the wrong reasons.

I know that because of how they're standing.

They cluster in twos and threes, and they keep their voices down, and their eyes keep sliding sideways.

Toward us. Toward Ronan.

I hear whispers before we even reach the tent. The treacherous hum of people saying a thing they don't want you to hear them saying. A woman in navy leans toward a man and cups her hand around her mouth. He glances at Ronan and then away, fast.

I know what they're saying. Everyone does.

That's him. That's the one. He killed Todd and then he had the nerve to bring the kids.

Ronan feels it, too. Not a surprise. He reads a room better than anyone I've ever met. But he doesn't puff up or shrink. He stays calm and composed, as if there's nobody watching at all.

"You don't have to stand with us," I tell him, quiet, so the kids don't hear.

His jaw tightens. "I know I don't."

"That's not what I meant. I meant—" I stop. I don't know what I meant. I guess I meant that every person here thinks he did it, and that standing next to us at the grave of the man he's accused of killing is going to look like guilt above all else.

"I'll stay back," he says. "I'll be here. But I'll stay back. This is for them." He looks past me at Hayden and Isabella climbing out of the car. "Not for me."

So that's what he does.

The service is short. A minister nobody in the family knows says a few words about a man he never met, reading off a card. It's exactly as hollow as it sounds. Todd's mother is here, Todd's mother who is dying herself, in a wheelchair with a nurse behind her. She cries the whole time. I feel bad for her because none of this is her fault. She loved her son. Whatever he became, she loved him first, before he'd done anything wrong.

I stand with the kids. Hayden on my right, Isabella on my left with her drawing pressed to her chest now, wrinkling it.

I keep my back straight and my chin up. I decided in the car that I was going to do this without folding. I have done harderthings than attend a funeral full of people who think I married my ex-husband's murderer. My children are watching how their mother stands when the whole world is whispering.

I don't cry. I keep waiting to and it doesn't come. I cried for Todd already, I think, a long time ago, before I even knew he was going to die. I cried for him at a kitchen island when I found the Santorini reservation with Paula's name where mine used to be.

That was the funeral, really.

This is just the part where they put him in the ground.

Ronan stands at the edge of it all, back near the treeline, hands folded in front of him, a big, dark shape against the green. He doesn't come closer. He doesn't sit under the tent. He just watches over us the way he watched over the house from the stoop all those nights.

Close enough to reach us, far enough not to make it about him.

Grigor is out there, too, and one other man I recognize, hanging back near the cars. Watching the perimeter even here. Even now. There's a part of me that resents that we need that, but a bigger part that's glad somebody is on duty, because I don't know where Lev is, and neither does anyone else.

I see Paula when the minister finishes.

She's at the very back. Alone, in a black coat that's too big for her. She looks nothing like the woman who leaned into my car window in the school line and told me I looked incredible.

She's thinner. Her hair's flat. She's got her arms wrapped around herself and she's crying in the ugly, exhausted way of someone who's been crying for days.

I didn't invite her. I don't know who did. Maybe nobody. Maybe she just saw the notice and came.

When it's over, when the minister steps back and the crowd starts to loosen and drift, she catches my eye across the grass.