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growing vivid and sharp. The assistant urged them out of the chambers, shooing them, saying, “Good luck! Congratulations!” as if she really meant it.
    The line waiting to get married was still long. More bikers, more pregnant brides. Olivia walked past them, saw flashes of bright blue eye shadow, colorful tattoos, beaded dresses, pierced eyebrows and lips. This was her receiving line, studying her, the new bride, the one who had finished what they were about to begin.
    Later that summer, she and David would buy that small purple cottage at the beach in Rhode Island. One hot August day there they would decide to start a family. They would hold all the promise and expectation and hope that two people in love can hold. So much came later that summer that all of it would seem to Olivia a blur of happiness.
    But on their wedding day, a sunny, breezy Friday in early June, Olivia wanted nothing more than to begin their life. She stopped at the door that led out and turned to the line of waiting brides.
    “Good luck!” she shouted. “Happy lives!”
    She felt that all the women standing there—pregnant and pierced, foreign and frightened, hopeful and eager—all of them looked at her and understood.
    She turned again to leave, hesitated, then tossed her bouquet of daisies over one shoulder. Someone squealed, delighted. All the brides-to-be cheered. Olivia looked to see who had caught it: a teenager, pregnant, round-cheeked, and nervous. The girl raised the bouquet to Olivia and grinned. Olivia flashed on a vision of herself one day: beaming and pregnant. And then even further in the future: an old married lady.
    David pushed the door open, and arm in arm he and Olivia stepped out into the blinding sunlight, into their future.
    Alone in her shop, Olivia stared at the pieces of felt and ribbon and trim. But she had no plans, no ideas. Her mind was blank. Like snow, she thought. Like blinding sun. Without David, she could not think of what to do next. Their apartment with the view of the Hudson River out the small kitchen window—and the Eames furniture that David had collected, and Olivia’s own flea-market finds and castoffs from interior-design shoots at You! —seemed foreign, the way airports feel when you emerge from an all-night transatlantic flight.
    She had no refuge. Over their months together, she and David had fought and made up and planned a future; they had become each other’s refuge. The beach house they’d bought sat empty now, unfinished, untended. Olivia could not even think of going there, of driving past the spot where David had been killed, of returning to the bed where she had slept so foolishly while he died.
    And then there was this: the morning he died, he had come out of the bathroom and gotten back into bed. He had kissed her, not even minding her morning breath. He had slipped his hand under the T-shirt she wore and found her breasts, sighing as he rubbed the nipples.
    “Go away,” she’d said. She had rolled away from him then. “I’m tired.”
    He hadn’t gone easily. He had pressed himself against her. He had moved his erection between her thighs. He had lifted her hair and kissed the nape of her neck.
    “Why don’t you go jogging?” she said.
    This time, his sigh was one of defeat rather than pleasure. “Good idea,” he’d said, leaving the bed. “Better than a cold shower.”
    He had not even seen her grinning at that. From her half sleep, Olivia heard him walk down the creaky steps and out the door. She heard him move toward his death a quarter of a mile away.
    Now, sitting alone in the Rose Tattoo, she once again thought about how making love that morning would have kept him safe. He would not have been on that curve, in that bright sun, at that very moment that Amanda drove her Honda Civic around it.
    Dear Amanda, she thought. But if she told the girl that it wasn’t her fault, Olivia would have to admit that she was the one who had sent her husband out that morning. No, she