Finally, after many talks, Marguerite walked Eddie through another door. They were back inside the small, round room. She sat on the stool and placed her fingers together. She turned to the mirror, and Eddie noticed her reflection. Hers, but not his.

Her eyes flashed.

She turned to him.

"You had to live without love for many years, didn't you?"

"You felt that it was snatched away, that I left you too soon."

"OK. Yes."

"What reason?" he said. "How could there be a reason? You died. You were forty-seven. You were the best person any of us knew, and you died and you lost everything. And I lost everything. I lost the only woman I ever loved."

"The bride waits here," she said, running her hands along her hair, taking in her image but seeming to drift away. "This is the moment you think about what you're doing. Who you're choosing. Who you will love. If it's right, Eddie, this can be such a wonderful moment."

"You were angry with me."

"You did leave too soon," he said.

"No."

Eddie said nothing.

He lowered himself slowly. Her lavender dress was spread before him.

"There was a reason to it all," she said.

Eddie thought about the years after he buried his wife. It was like looking over a fence. He was aware of another kind of life out there, even as he knew he would never be a part of it. "I never wanted anyone else," he said quietly.

"Life has to end," she said. "Love doesn't."

"I was still in love with you."

"I know," she said.

"Lost love is still love, Eddie. It takes a different form, that's all. You can't see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. But when those senses weaken, another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it.

"I know." She nodded. "I felt it."

"Here?" he asked.

She took his hands. "No, you didn't. I was right here. And you loved me anyway.

"I was saving this one," she said.

"Even here," she said, smiling. "That's how strong lost love can be."

She stood and opened a door, and Eddie blinked as he entered behind her. It was a dimly lit room, with foldable chairs, and an accordion player sitting in the corner.

"Yes."

You made me love you

"Change it?" She looked amused. "To what?"

She took a moment, then came again into his arms. The accordion man played the familiar notes. She hummed in his ear and they began to move together, slowly, in a remembered rhythm that a husband shares only with his wife.

She lowered her arms. "I wasn't so pretty at the end."

"How come you look the way you looked the day I married you?"

"I thought you'd like it that way."

"To the end."

"All that's missing," Marguerite whispered, taking his shoulder, "is the bingo cards."

I didn 't want to do it

He thought for a moment. "Can you change it?"

"Could you?"

"Can I ask you something?" he said.

She held out her arms. And for the first time in heaven, he initiated his contact, he came to her, ignoring the leg, ignoring all the ugly associations he had made about dance and music and weddings, realizing now that they were really about loneliness.

Eddie shook his head, as if to say not true.

He grinned and put a hand behind her waist.

I didn't want to do it…

You made me love you

and all the time you knew it

When he opened his eyes, his arms still held her shape, but she was gone, and so was everything else.

and all the time you knew it…

When he moved his head back, she was 47 again, the web of lines beside her eyes, the thinner hair, the looser skin beneath her chin. She smiled and he smiled, and she was, to him, as beautiful as ever, and he closed his eyes and said for the first time what he'd been feeling from the moment he saw her again: "I don't want to go on. I want to stay here."