On the morning the civil verdict was delivered, Dorothea was not at the courthouse. She was at 402 Sycamore Lane in her garden when Gregory Beaumont called at 10:47.
She listened. She said, "Thank you."
She set the phone down in the soil beside the petunia flat she had been working from, the way you set something down when you want both hands free.
She became aware, at some point in the next few minutes, that across the street a large moving truck was parked in Sandra Bellwether's driveway, and the work of loading it had been ongoing in the background of the morning without drawing her particular attention until now: two men carrying a velvet sofa through the front door, the lowering whine of the truck's lift gate, the careful stacking of boxed items along the interior wall.
Sandra appeared on the sidewalk in front of her house, and for a moment, across the width of the street in the ordinary morning light, their eyes met. Brief. Sandra looked away quickly and completely—the look of a person averting from something that carries too much weight for sustained contact. What was there in her face was smaller and less defined than anything that had been there before: the face of someone who has lost the story she was telling about herself and not yet found a replacement.
Dorothea did not call out. She did not wave, did not perform for Sandra's awareness of her, did not do anything that would have been for anyone other than herself. She simply turned back to the flower bed, where the petunias of the second planting cycle were doing what the second planting cycle does: growing thicker and more fully, the root system established now in soil that knew them, the blooms deeper and richer than the first year's tentative opening.
She thought of Marcus: not with grief, but with gratitude—the specific gratitude of a person who has been given something by someone and is still living in it, still finding new dimensions of it in ordinary moments. She thought of what he would have said about the petunias, the specific thing he would have said, and she almost heard it, and she smiled.