She tumbled out of the bed and tried to make her legs cooperate. She could hear her parents talking in the kitchen. She wondered where he was.

He had handled everything so well. Just stood back, let it happen. They had known that the day would come that her old life merged with her new life, and it hadn't been as painful as she thought.

She was trying to remember where she left her robe when she saw him. He was sitting in the corner, holding the picture that she had brought for Maria.

"Good morning."

He didn't answer. He looked up at her and she saw that he had been crying.

"Hey," she said, kneeling down beside him. "What's the matter?"

"It's... Maria," he choked out. Liz could never understand this. He could never explain. "I shouldn't have come. She doesn't need to have me to deal with on top of everything else."

"Don't be ridiculous. Maria is glad that you are here. Good grief, you were almost her brother once."

The words stung him even more. Brother. Maria was lucky that he wasn't her brother. Because she deserved better than that. Michael Guerin had known that.

Liz wrapped her arms around him. The stress of all of this was just too much. She couldn't remember ever having seen him cry before. And to cry for Maria. She was touched.

She pulled back and looked into his eyes. I love you, she tried to tell him with her own. She couldn't bring herself to say the words. Not now. "We need to get ready. It's going to be a long day."

*****

Maria looked out into the sea of faces. Who would have guessed that this many people would care? That loner from the start Michael Guerin could have had this many people surrounding him? She wondered if even he knew.

"Michael Guerin was a great person," she began. Except that he wasn't a person. She wanted to scream it from the rooftops. He wasn't a fucking person and that was the only reason that he had to die. But she just continued with her speech. "He was my best friend. He was everything."

She couldn't go on. She couldn't stand in front of all of these people and tell him things that she couldn't even tell him. She looked out at this strange crowd of people. Mr. and Mrs. Evans looked terrible. They had flown in this morning and come straight to the ceremony. Liz was near tears, leaning on Kyle's shoulder. There were people from work, even some people from school. People that she never would have dreamed of, yet here they were to grieve someone that they didn't really even know. Only five people in this room really knew Michael Guerin.

*****

"When I first met Michael, well, got to know him, I didn't have any idea what to make of him," Liz said, smiling. "He was the strangest guy I ever met. But once you scratched the surface-and trust me, that took *a lot* of scratching-you discovered this amazing person. He was the most loyal friend I have ever known." She paused, trying to decide whether or not to say the next part. But she knew that Maria needed to hear it.

"When I first started seeing Max, Michael was not very keen on the idea." She looked at Max, who managed a weak smile. "But after a while I think that Michael discovered that I wasn't going to hurt Max. Or him. He told me once that he was glad to have a friend in me, and he said one of the nicest things that anyone has ever said to me. He said, 'Thanks for giving me one more reason to envy Max Evans.'"

The look in Max's eye was more than she could take, so she moved her eyes to meet Maria's. "Anyway, Michael was also a wonderful husband. There was a time when I would have said that no one was good enough for Maria DeLuca, least of all Michael Guerin. But he was. On their wedding day, he came to me before everything started and he told me that he would take care of her. And then he told me that he didn't envy Max Evans anymore." She smiled and blinked back her tears. "Michael was everything that we should strive to be. He taught me a great deal about friendship. I mean, he was thrust into this friendship with me, and yet he protected me and loved me until the day that he died."

*****

"I don't remember life without Michael in it," Isabel said. "To so many people, Michael was this weird guy who was hard to know. But he wasn't that to me. Michael is a part of me, and I am a part of him. He was a brother to me in the same way that Max is. And I can still feel that part of him in me. That will never die." She sighed. This was hard to do. There were still so many things that couldn't be said. Michael was one of two people who understand me. Michael was alone, just like me. But she couldn't say that. Lies still surrounded them, even in death.

*****

"Michael was the strongest guy I ever met," Alex said. "I don't mean physically, though obviously he was. But Michael was strong when it came to life. He could have been beaten by a lot of things. Most people expected so little of him. But he proved them wrong."

He looked out among the crowd of people. They all thought that he was talking about school. They couldn't realize how much Michael had overcome. "I watch people, I always have. So I tend to observe things in people that are a bit more hidden beneath the surface. And I won't lie to you, when he and Maria first started going out, I was really worried. I mean, here was this guy I knew nothing about sweeping in and taking one of my best friends away. But I watched him, and after a while I began to see that he cared about her in a way that I hadn't known was possible. He loved her in a way that I didn't know existed. He protected her with his life." He looked at Maria. Even she couldn't understand what he was talking about. "By watching them, I learned what true love was."

*****

"Michael was my best friend," Max began. He hated this. He couldn't begin to verbalize all that Michael had been to him. "Like Isabel said, I don't remember life without him. He was a force to be reckoned with. He just sort of burst into your life and said here I am, deal with me."

He looked at Liz. She had heard this before. "But he was a great friend. Everything that he ever did was out of a desire to find the truth. The truth about who his friends were, who his family was, who *he* was. I hope in the end he knew that all of the people in this room were his friends. I hope that he knew that-" he had found his home. "That he was loved."

*****

"Thank you all for being here today," Maria said, trying to smile. "It means a great deal to me. And thank you to everyone who spoke today. I love you so much. He loved you so much."

She took a deep breath and tried to continue. "If he were here, I know what he would say. Well, he wouldn't say it, but he would think it and he would tell me later. He would think that this was too much of a fuss, and he would feel that he wasn't worthy of all of this attention. He would say that he never intended to stay here for long. And then he would try to impress me with one of his Joyce quotes. I hope that he likes the one that I picked to share with you. 'Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.'"*

With that, Maria collapsed into tears. Her Michael was gone and nothing would ever be the same again. And it didn't matter because nothing did.