It doesn't even feel like she's gone.
It's an absence filled with air, not empty but not full.
Adie wears black well, according to Aunt Caroline who stands with her niece at the visitation. For three hours she smiles, automatic with her "Thank yous" and her handshakes.
Her mother would have been glad. The charities they chose to give to were the Children's Hospital that Rosie had aided in the last months of her life and the half way house where she quietly and self sacrificially helped those who could not help themselves. Adie had never realized what a beautiful person her mother was until the funeral. People she didn't even know sobbed and mourned for her mother. They tell Adie what a difference Rosie had made in their lives. Its all Adie can do to keep her face plastered. Adie wears a mask like her mother's corpse, dressed in her rose dress with the pearl buttons in her casket.
They say the dead look asleep, but they really don't.
They look like mannequins, former shells of what they used to be; hollowed mines, abandoned houses.
Adie thinks this in the graveyard, the past few days a blur of black cloth and white roses. The musky red cover of the coffin gently closes over her mother. The Priest says a few words that bleed and blend into the wind, sun and birds weaving a morbid song. A picture is being painted on her memory.
Adie needs to keep her sanity, so she takes the picture of her father and files it under 'dead' in her mind. After that horrible night he hasn't been seen. She can't think of her daddy, who used to swing her high over his head and read silly children's books over and over to her running around a half human, half insane monster. So she buries him with her mother and pretends it never happened.
That is how she gets by.
It was at the funeral that Harry first saw her, and didn't think anything of it.
It was at the funeral that Adie first saw him and didn't even acknowledge him.
Nobody thinks a whole lot at funerals anyway.
A/N: I cannot tell you how much writing this story is like therapy for me. This past chapter is written from personal experience. I've lost my uncle, my grandfather, and my cousen all in the past six months and I haven't talked about it till now. It just feels so good to get it out I guess. I promise the next chapters will become less morbid! I know the first three were real downers but fear not, Adie is a joyful girl remember? (-; thanks for reading, i shall not dissapoint!