Young. Dark hair. Black coat. Red lipstick bright even from this distance, a slash of color in the wet dark. She held his hand while he spoke. Then she leaned into him, and he did not step away.
Dorothy did not move.
The paper cup in her hand crumpled slowly until cold water ran through her fingers.
The woman left first, climbing into a separate car. Grant remained where he was for a few seconds, head bent, then straightened his tie and walked back toward the hospital entrance with the face of a bereaved husband.
Dorothy set the crushed cup down on the windowsill.
Something inside her, somewhere beneath the grief, shifted.
Not certainty. Not yet.
Just the oldest instinct a mother has.
Something is wrong.
Colleen’s funeral was held three days later under stained-glass saints who looked down with expressions too gentle for what had happened. White lilies lined the front of the church. Dorothy had chosen a closed casket. She could not bear the thought of strangers peering at her daughter’s stillness and calling it peaceful.
There was nothing peaceful about a woman dying on an operating table while three newborns screamed their way into the world.
Grant spoke at the podium.
He was good. Dorothy would later admit that to herself when she was being honest. He knew where to pause. He knew how much emotion to show without seeming theatrical. He knew how to look down at his folded paper just long enough to gather himself before continuing.
“Colleen was the light of my life,” he said.
Soft sobs rose from the pews.
“She was generous, brave, impossible not to love. She gave everything for this family. Everything.”
Dorothy sat in the front row beside her son Fletcher, called Fletch by everyone who loved him. He had flown in from Portland at dawn, broad-shouldered and silent and carrying the kind of rage that made the air around him feel electrically unstable.
He had not spoken a full sentence since arriving.
When Grant said, “I don’t know how to do this without her,” Fletch’s jaw flexed hard.
Dorothy leaned slightly toward him. “Not here,” she murmured.
At the back of the church, a woman in black signed the guest book.
Red lipstick.
The same woman from the parking garage.
Under the line marked Relationship, she wrote: close family friend.