The protesters had been waiting outside the clinic, sitting in their lawn chairs, sipping from their thermoses of hot coffee, for all intents and purposes looking like tailgaters waiting for the big game. Lena ’s appearance had caused them all to stand in unison, to scream at her, waving signs with all sorts of graphic, bloody pictures. Obscenely, one even held up a jar, the implied contents obvious to anyone standing within ten feet of it. Still, it didn’t look real, and she wondered at the man- of course it was a man- sitting at home, maybe at his kitchen table where his kids sat and had breakfast every morning, preparing the mixture in the jar just to torment frightened women who were making what Lena knew was the most difficult decision of their lives.

Now, sitting in the cemetery, staring at her sister’s grave, Lena let herself wonder for the first time what the clinic did with the flesh and bone they had removed from her own body. Was it lying somewhere in an incinerator, waiting to ignite? Was it buried in the earth, an unmarked grave she would never see? She felt a clenching deep down in her gut, in her womb, as she thought of what she had done- what she had lost.

In her mind, she told Sibyl what had happened; the choices she had made that brought her here. She talked about Ethan, how something inside of her had died when she started seeing him, how she had let everything good about herself ebb away like sand being taken with the tide. She told her about Terri, the fear in her eyes. If only she could take it all back. If only she had never met Ethan, never seen Terri at the clinic. Everything was going from bad to worse. She was telling lies to cover lies, burying herself in deceit. She couldn’t see a way out of it.

What Lena wanted most of all was to have her sister there, if only for a moment, to tell her that everything was going to be okay. That had been the nature of their relationship from the beginning of time: Lena fucked up and Sibyl smoothed things over, talking it through with her, making her see the other side. Without her guiding wisdom, it all seemed like such a lost cause. Lena was falling apart. There was no way she could have given birth to Ethan’s child. She could barely take care of herself.

“Lee?”

She turned around, nearly falling off the narrow block. “Greg?”

He emerged from the darkness, the moon glowing behind him. He was limping toward her, his cane in one hand, a bouquet of flowers in the other.

She stood quickly, wiping her eyes, trying to hide her shock. “What are you doing here?” she asked, rubbing grit off the back of her pants.

He dropped the bouquet to his side. “I can come back when you’re finished.”

“No,” she told him, hoping the darkness hid the fact that she had been crying. “I just… it’s fine.” She glanced back at the grave so that she wouldn’t have to look at him. She had a flash of Abigail Bennett, buried alive, and Lena felt an unreasonable panic fill her. For just a split second she thought of her sister alive, begging for help, trying to claw her way out of the casket.

She wiped her eyes before looking back at him, thinking she must be losing her mind. She wanted to tell him everything that had happened- not just in Atlanta, but before then, back to that day she had returned to the police station after running some samples to Macon, only to have Jeffrey tell her that Sibyl was gone. She wanted to put her head on his shoulder and feel his comfort. More than anything, she wanted his absolution.

“Lee?” Greg asked.

She searched for a response. “I was just wondering why you’re here.”

“I had to get Mama to bring me,” he explained. “She’s back in the car.”

Lena looked over his shoulder as if she could see the parking lot in front of the church. “It’s kind of late.”

“She tricked me,” he said. “Made me go to her knitting circle with her.”

Her tongue felt thick in her mouth, but she wanted nothing more than to keep hearing him talk. She had forgotten how soothing his voice could be, how gentle the sound. “Did she make you hold the yarn?”

He laughed. “Yeah. You’d think I’d quit falling for that.”

Lena felt herself smile, knowing he hadn’t been tricked. Greg would deny it at gunpoint, but he had always been a mama’s boy.

“I brought these for Sibby,” he said, holding up the flowers again. “I came yesterday and there weren’t any, so I figured…” He smiled. In the moonlight, she saw he still hadn’t managed to fix the tooth she had accidentally chipped during a game of Frisbee.

He said, “She loved daisies,” handing Lena the flowers. For just a second, their hands brushed, and she felt as if she had touched a live wire.

For his part, Greg seemed unfazed. He started to leave, but Lena said, “Wait.”

Slowly, he turned back around.

“Sit down,” she told him, indicating the block.

“I don’t want to take your seat.”

“It’s okay.” She stepped back to place the flowers in front of Sibyl’s marker. When she looked back up, Greg was leaning on his cane, watching her.

He asked, “You okay?”

Lena tried to think of something to say. She sniffed, wondering if her eyes were as red as they felt. “Allergies,” she told him.

“Yeah.”

Lena crossed her hands behind her back so she wouldn’t wring them again. “How’d you hurt your leg, exactly?”

“Car accident,” he told her, then smiled again. “Totally my fault. I was trying to find a CD and I took my eyes off the road for just a second.”

“That’s all it takes.”

“Yeah,” he said, then, “Mister Jingles died last year.”

His cat. She had hated the thing, but for some reason she was sad to hear that he was gone. “I’m sorry.”

The breeze picked up, the tree overhead shushing in the wind.

Greg squinted at the moon, then looked back at Lena. “When Mom told me about Sibyl…” His voice trailed off, and he dug his cane into the ground, pushing up some grass. She thought she saw tears in his eyes and made herself look away so that his sadness did not reignite her own.

He said, “I just couldn’t believe it.”

“I guess she told you about me, too.”

He nodded, and he did something that not many people could do when they talked about rape: he looked her right in the eye. “She was upset.”

Lena didn’t try to hide her sarcasm. “I bet.”

“No, really,” Greg assured her, still looking at her, his clear blue eyes void of any guile. “My aunt Shelby- you remember her?” Lena nodded. “She was raped when they were in high school. It was pretty bad.”

“I didn’t know,” Lena said. She had met Shelby a few times. As with Greg’s mother, they hadn’t exactly bonded. Lena would never have guessed the older woman had something like that in her life. She was very tightly wound, but most of the women in the Mitchell family were. The one thing Lena had been astounded by since her attack was that being raped had put her in what was not exactly an exclusive club.

“If I had known…” Greg began, but didn’t finish.

“What?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” He reached down and picked up a pecan that had fallen off the tree. “I was really upset to hear it.”

“It was pretty upsetting,” Lena allowed, and surprise registered on his face. She asked, “What?”

“I don’t know,” he repeated, tossing the pecan into the wood. “You used to not say things like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like feelings.”

She forced out a laugh. Her whole life was a struggle with feelings. “What things did I used to say?”

He mulled it over. “‘That’s life’?” he tried, mimicking her one-sided shrug. “‘Tough shit’?”

She knew he was right, but she couldn’t begin to know how to explain it. “People change.”

“ Nan says you’re seeing somebody.”

“Yeah, well” was all she could say, but her heart had flipped in her chest at the thought of him bothering to ask. She was going to kill Nan for not telling her.