Surrounded by sixty thousand dollars of hand-carved Italian marble pedestals, antique silver candelabras, and bronze display caskets…
Was not a florist.
Standing on the black-and-white marble tiles, wearing my grandfather’s twenty-ounce Scottish tweed hacking jacket, my hands resting easily in the deep patch pockets, my unpolished bronze transit pin gleaming beside my lapel…
Was Coraly.
Me.
The woman he had left in Room 414 ninety minutes ago.
I was not wearing a hospital gown. I was not hooked to an IV drip. I was not bent double over a surgical incision, gasping for breath through a cloud of synthetic opioids.
My posture was four inches taller than Thaddius had ever seen it. My spine was straight, reinforced by thirty-four years of generational bedrock. My hazel eyes, completely clear, completely dry, swept up the length of the grand mahogany staircase and locked onto my husband’s face with forty decibels of compressed polar diamond.
