I knelt on my living room floor among the air mattresses and the snoring strangers, and I took them out one by one.

The glass on the wedding photo was cracked. Right across the corner. Right across Robert’s hand holding mine.

That’s when David’s mother walked into the kitchen.

I heard her before I saw her. Slippers shuffling across my kitchen tile. Then the clink of my coffee pot.

I stood up with the photographs in my arms and walked back down the hall.

She was standing at my counter, making coffee in my coffee maker. With my coffee. In a fuzzy pink bathrobe I’d never seen before.

Linda Henderson. David’s mother.

She was a tall woman, sixty-three or so, with silver hair cut in a sharp bob and very good posture. She ran the PTA at David’s old high school for fifteen years, and she ran it, I’d always heard, like a general runs an army.

She turned around and saw me.

“Oh!” she said brightly. “You’re back early!”

“I’m back,” I said, “when I said I’d be back. Sunday morning. I told Emily three weeks ago.”

Linda glanced toward the living room. At all the sleeping bodies.

“Well,” she said, lowering her voice. “Everyone’s still sleeping. Could you maybe keep your voice down? Some of them drove twelve hours from Kentucky.”

I looked at her.

I held up the stack of silver frames in my arms.

“This is my house, Linda,” I said.

“Of course, dear,” Linda said. “Of course it is. But we’re practically family. Aren’t we?”

She said it like that settled everything.

Practically family.

Like being the mother of my daughter’s husband gave her the right to put fifteen people on my floor and my husband’s photographs in a drawer.

I wanted to scream.

I wanted to march into that living room and clap my hands and turn on every light and shout, Everybody out. Right now. Get out of my house.

I’m not proud of how close I came to doing it.

But I’d been married to Robert for thirty-four years. And Robert had a saying. He said it to me every time I got angry about something, which, I’ll admit, was more often than I’d like.

Hot heads make cold decisions, Carol. Count to ten.

So I counted to ten.

And while I was counting, I remembered something.

Something my sister had given me before I left Florida.

“Actually, Linda,” I said. “I brought something back from my trip. I think everyone should see it.”

Linda smiled. A big, relieved smile. Like she’d won.

“Oh, how thoughtful,” she said. “A souvenir?”

“Something like that,” I said.

I went upstairs.

I had to carry my suitcase up the stairs around all the luggage blocking the steps. I bumped my shin twice. When I got to my bedroom, I found that somebody had slept in my bed. The sheets were rumpled. There was a strange phone charger plugged into the wall by my nightstand.

I didn’t let myself think about that. Not yet.

I set my suitcase on the floor and unzipped it.

Inside my bag, wrapped in a soft cotton sweater, was a small wooden box.

A keepsake urn. Polished cherry wood, about the size of a jewelry box. With a little brass latch.

It held some of Robert’s ashes.

Robert died four years ago. A brief illness. Pancreatic cancer. Diagnosed in March, gone by June. It happened so fast I still sometimes wake up thinking he’s downstairs making coffee.

He’d always wanted his ashes scattered in the ocean at Clearwater Beach. Right where we stood on our thirtieth anniversary. The place in the photograph.

For four years, I couldn’t do it. The urn sat on the shelf in my bedroom closet. Every time I thought about opening it, I couldn’t breathe.

This year, my sister, June, finally talked me into it.

“Come down,” she said on the phone. “Stay with me for two weeks. We’ll do it together. Just you and me. And then you’ll have it done, Carol. You’ll be able to breathe again.”

So I flew down to Florida with Robert’s ashes in my carry-on bag.

On a calm morning in the middle of my trip, June and I stood at the edge of the water at Clearwater Beach at sunrise. Just the two of us. And I let him go.

But I couldn’t let all of him go.

I kept a little. Just a little. June had bought the cherry wood keepsake urn at a shop in town and given it to me the night before.

“For the part of him you’re not ready to let go of yet,” she said.

The urn had a removable inner lid. A thin wooden panel that sat on top of a sealed plastic container holding the ashes. There was a little space between the inner lid and the outer lid. About half an inch.

And that was where I’d put the photograph.

Two days before I left Florida, June gave me something else.

She’d been sorting through our mother’s belongings. Mom died last fall, at ninety-one. She’d lived in the same little bungalow in St. Petersburg for forty years, and her garage was packed to the ceiling.

June had found a cardboard box in the back corner of that garage. It said ROBERT — MISC. on the side in Robert’s handwriting.