And at least four of them were holding up phones.
They were there because of the photograph.
Because I had posted it.
I stood on that grass in a black coat and watched about twenty people attend the funeral of somebody they had never met.
And what I felt, standing there, was proud.
That is the truth and it lasted about four minutes and I have had two years to look at it.
I looked at a graveside with twenty people at it and I thought: I did that. She would have been so pleased.
It took me until the drive home to work out what I was actually looking at, which is that not one of those people could have told you her name without checking their phone.
Every single one of them was there because of an image that I had put on the internet at twenty past eight on a Tuesday evening.
As the nurses walked back to their cars, a man in a dark suit came over.
He introduced himself as her solicitor. Ferris. Sixty, glasses, a leather case that has clearly been resoled the way shoes are.
He offered his condolences, properly, and then his manner changed.
He said: can we speak somewhere.
And I said I would rather stay where I was, because I did not know that man from anybody and there were twenty strangers on that grass.
I thought he was going to tell me I was in trouble.
That is genuinely what I thought, standing on that grass: solicitor, funeral, envelope — somebody is about to tell me I should not have married a patient.
I had been half waiting for it for eleven days. The hospice had been fine about it and the chaplain had been fine about it and I had still been waiting.
He checked over his shoulder. Then he got hold of my wrist and said it loud enough for a good many of them:
Not here. Not in front of these people.
Nobody moved. Somebody put an order of service down on a chair.
He did not let go. He leaned in and said: please. Not here.
Then he said: I need you to see this.
And then: she didn’t choose you by accident.
PART 3
There was no will in that envelope.
There was a file. On me.
Thirty-one pages, in a plastic wallet. A printout of my volunteer registration form. Two photographs I did not know existed, taken in the hospice garden, from a distance, by somebody standing at a window.
