When she leaves, she lingers.
He sees her in flashes around corners, in brunettes in elevators, in books - she never really leaves, just becomes more intangible and impossibly far way.
In many ways, his grief is as real and as palpable as everyone else. They're mourning a friend, a confidante, an advisor, whereas he's mourning the what-ifs.
Aaron doesn't like to live with regrets - it's how his father died, and he wants to be nothing like his father. Sending her away seemed selfish and ignorant, both traits a reminder of the man he hopes to never be.
He forces himself to think of what she would've wanted, and a stake through the chest, literal or not, would be the way - as her own woman, in an act of protection.
That's what it boiled down to - protection. Not the protection of her own life, no, that was secondary, but the lives of those around her.
And all he can do is mourn a very alive woman, long after her empty casket was lowered into the soil, a mass of white flowers atop the wood.
She lingered in flowers from then on - notable reminders of the beauty in the bleakest situations. Purple buds would haunt him as much as they did her; signals of the beginning of the end.
No matter where in the world they'd be, he'd see glimpses of her in cemeteries, sitting on memorial benches, eyes to the sky. Because he never had any way of knowing where she'd been reassigned, she was perpetually amongst the headstones, more a ghost than those resting beneath granite.
Like a trail on water, the lingering of perfume, she remained. Intangible, incalculable, but irreversibly present.