Chapter 9 - THE SCATTERED BLOSSOMS
Two weeks later, the morning air was crisp and scented with pine as my truck turned off the paved highway onto the private gravel drive of Willow Ridge Lodge.
The property was utterly deserted.
The lodge had been closed for three weeks while the management conducted an internal review following the scandal that had dominated every front page from Denver to Albuquerque. The white chairs were gone from the garden terrace. The strings of soft lights had been taken down from the wooden beams, and the mountain laurel on the arbor had withered, leaving behind bare birch branches that swayed in the autumn breeze.
The passenger door opened, and Emily stepped down onto the gravel.
She wore her favorite red flannel jacket, blue jeans, and small hiking boots. Her dark hair was tied back in a neat ponytail, and her cheeks were flushed pink from the cool wind. In her small hands, she carried a brown paper bag.
Laura stepped out from the driver's side of her own car, walking up beside me as I stood at the edge of the flagstone terrace.
"Are you sure she wants to be here, Andrew?" Laura murmured, watching Emily walk toward the stone steps where the ceremony had collapsed two weeks earlier.
"She asked to come," I said quietly. "She said she wanted to see the grass."
Emily didn't run. She walked with quiet, thoughtful steps down the flagstone path, stopping at the exact spot where the string quartet had fallen silent, where my grandmother's ring had rolled across the mossy grout.
She stood beneath the bare wooden arbor, looking out toward Pikes Peak. The mountain was majestic, its white peaks gleaming like polished silver against the deep sapphire sky.
I walked down the steps, stopping two paces behind her.
"What do you think, sweetheart?" I asked softly.
Emily turned around, holding open the brown paper bag. Inside were dozens of small, dried wildflower blossoms—blue columbines, yellow mountain daisies, and purple asters that she and Laura had gathered from the meadow behind our house over the weekend.
"Vanessa said that dead people don't get seats at weddings," Emily said, her voice clear, steady, and devoid of the terror that had choked her in the laundry room. "She thought if people remembered Mommy, it would make the day ugly."
She reached into the bag and pulled out a handful of purple petals.
"Mommy loved columbines," Emily whispered. "She used to say they were the toughest flowers in the world because they can grow out of solid granite."
Emily raised her hands high above her head and opened her fingers.
The mountain wind caught the petals, lifting them into the bright morning sunlight. They swirled in a dancing, violet spiral around the wooden arbor, floating out over the terrace, scattering across the green grass where the white chairs had once stood, drifting down toward the pine-covered valley below.
Emily took another handful, scattering them to the wind, her face turned up toward the sun, a bright, radiant smile breaking across her features.
"Goodbye, Vanessa," Emily said to the wind.
She turned to me, her small boots crumping on the flagstones as she walked straight into my arms. I lifted her up, holding her close against my shoulder as she wrapped her arms around my neck, resting her chin against my collar.
"Can we go get hot chocolate now, Daddy?" she asked, her eyes sparkling with pure, untroubled childhood joy. "With the little marshmallows?"
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"We can get as many marshmallows as they have in the kitchen," I laughed, kissing her cheek.
We walked back up the stone steps together, hand in hand, leaving the empty arbor and the scattered petals behind us in the autumn light.
