“Why?” he asks her, and she has no answer.

“Why not?” she replies instead, but that is always the answer of cowards, and the conversation lapses into silence.

Now, she sits on her hands, breathing fire into the wet air. John sits opposite her. They both stare at her bouquet, this pitiful offering – the flower heads are already limp. She desperately tries to shake the snow off them.

John exhales, his face cold. She misses his smile. She misses that most of all.

“You should be at home,” he scolds her.

Or perhaps he would have said: “You should be wearing more layers.”

Maybe even: “I’ve always loved crocuses.”

He did love them. He loved their funny little anthers – he could always find a face in them. It always made her laugh when he pointed them out. But what does she know? She’s the one who missed the funeral, after all, on her stupid quest to find flowers. Perhaps she never really knew him at all.

More snow throttles the flowers. She bats it off.

It’s no use – the petals are paper-thin, and she can almost see the stems withering to nothing, folding in on themselves. Soon, the blossoms will crumble, purple curling to brown, and the bouquet will die and die until it is finally dead, decomposing into the snow, and then the dirt, and maybe it will migrate five feet until it joins the casket to keep John company, a reminder of the life that is now death, so incredibly, irrevocably, staggeringly gone.

Suddenly, she can’t bear to touch them.

“I thought you might like them,” she tells John, and props the bouquet carefully against the headstone. No response. The snow was really coming down now, and his image was fading with it. Crazy girl. She forces herself to look away, down at her bouquet.

The flowers are still purple. Their faces stare up at her.

And in them, you could perhaps imagine a smile.