On Saturday morning, Mary woke before the alarm she hadn't needed to set.
The wedding dress was in the wardrobe. She didn't get it out. She knew how it would feel to wear it, how easily she could move her arms, and she didn't want to stand in front of the mirror wondering what she'd have looked like walking into the room.
She would have been getting ready with her mother. June would have come, probably with something practical nobody else remembered. Adam would have been elsewhere, dressed and waiting, and at two o'clock she would have walked towards him.
Mary lay still until the ceiling stopped being somewhere to put those pictures.
In the kitchen, she made breakfast. The piece of tart waited in the fridge. She left it for lunch and ate bread with butter, listening to the radio she liked having on while she got ready.
She hadn't spoken to Ruth since the dinner. Her mother had not turned up or demanded a Sunday. Mary was glad and hurt by the absence at once. She didn't want today to become an excuse for restoring everything neither of them had yet learnt how to change.
At ten she opened her laptop. There was work she could do. She changed one small thing on a design and then spent twenty minutes looking at it without knowing if it was better.
She saved it and stopped. The day didn't need to be useful before she was allowed to dislike it.
June was helping run the public summer event at the hall. Mary had known about it before there was a wedding date. It was the other thing Merehaven would do on the twentieth of June, ordinary people setting out chairs and hoping the weather held.
She could stay here. Nobody was expecting her to put on a cheerful face and turn a cancellation into a celebration.
At half past twelve she showered. She put on clothes she'd worn before and stood in front of the mirror long enough to brush her hair. Then she took her keys.
The hall's front doors were open. A child ran through them ahead of her, holding the hand of a woman who was trying to make him slow down. The entrance sign was still where she and Adam had hung it.
Mary stopped to look at it.
The letters were clear. The gap she'd asked for was there. She could remember loving that he had accepted the correction, though she hadn't called it loving at the time.
The sign could do its job without giving her a verdict about the morning they'd made it.
She went inside.
June was carrying a stack of paper plates. When she saw Mary, she set them down and came over without saying anything loudly enough for other people to turn.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello.”
“Are you all right?”
“Not really.”
June nodded. “Do you want tea?”
“Yes.”
They walked to the kitchen. Someone asked June where the spare tablecloths were, and she answered while filling the kettle. Mary liked being beside a day that had demands unrelated to her.
“I can't stay with you much,” June said.
“I know. I came to the event.”
“Then enjoy the deeply unreliable entertainment.”
Mary smiled. A microphone squealed in the main room as if it had heard.
She took the tea outside. There were stalls and tables, people examining plants, a group arranging instruments under a small canopy. Mary found a chair near the edge and sat down. She didn't need to buy anything. She could watch.
Her phone showed two minutes to two.
She put it back in her bag.
At the hotel there would have been chairs facing the front. A short piece of music. Adam turning to look at her. Here, someone was trying to stop a table cover lifting in the breeze. A man began playing a tune she didn't recognise. The afternoon moved through the minute without asking her permission.
Mary cried a little, looking down at her cup. Nobody came to make it mean something else.
Then the wind lifted the table cover again, carrying a paper plate across the grass. It landed near her feet. She picked it up and handed it to the woman running the stall, who thanked her and weighed the others down with a book.
It wasn't a new beginning. It was something to do with her hands at a difficult moment.
She stayed for another tune. Afterwards she looked at the plants and bought a small one she had room for. She knew that didn't make her suddenly capable of keeping it alive.
June passed on her way to solve another problem and touched Mary's shoulder. Mary reached up and touched her hand in return. Neither of them stopped the event to discuss the day.
When she walked home, the wedding hour had gone by. The evening was still ahead of her. There was tart in the fridge and a room that was hers, with space on the windowsill for one more uncertain plant.