Author's note: Sadly, these wonderful characters are not mine and I apologise for any OOC moments.
I thank you profusely in advance for your reviews and criticisms.
Obviously, with what's coming up in "Beta," Grace has been on my mind, so I pulled out this old idea and polished it up. Enjoy!

She comes every Tuesday (and sometimes Thursdays), Grace the gentle artist. She's one of the fixtures of my beat and, though she rarely buys ice cream, I fondly consider her a regular.

Another of the fixtures, and one of my regulars, is Harold. Harold comes to the park nearly every day, talks with me as he buys his ice cream cone, then settles down on a bench with the ice cream and (often) a book. One day, after buying an ice cream cone, he talks to Grace. They start appearing together regularly after that, talking and laughing, reading and painting in silence, holding hands, and I'm even a stop on a birthday scavenger hunt Harold sets up for Grace. I'll not deny I'm a romantic, and I freely admit that the sight of that couple makes me smile every time I see them.

Then, after four years, I don't see them at all. I think that perhaps they moved away out of New York, but then one day I see Grace sitting at her usual place. She sits there with her easel, but nothing gets painted that day. She stares out at the city for a while, sitting amid the mourning doves, then suddenly throws her gear together and leaves.

I don't see her again until about mid-spring, irregularly and always alone, Harold never making an appearance and she rarely doing any work at all. Sometimes I see her smile when someone stops to talk with her, but there's always a sadness there behind it and I wonder what happened.

Eventually there is a day where it is about time for me to pack up, and she is alone, and I see her brushing away tears with the hand that uses a brush to create nice paintings. I grab the ice cream bar Harold always used to order for her and approach her with it.

"Hey," I said, "You look like you could use some ice cream, and Harold said this was your favorite."

To my extreme unease, she bursts into tears. I stand by awkwardly, debating whether I should just back off or... or what? Give her a hug? Offer her a paper napkin? Try to do something comforting, anyway. Fortunately she makes my choice for me by getting ahold of herself, wiping away at her tears and pulling out a handkerchief to dab at her runny nose.

Though tears leaked a bit from the corner of her eyes, her voice is fairly steady and she gives me an apologetic smile, "I'm so sorry. It's-it's just-"

"Did something happen between you and Harold?" I ask. Honestly, I couldn't imagine it. Sure, every couple got into fights, probably even the gentle Grace and Harold, but never, as little as I knew them, could I imagine they'd break up - they were, to use a cliché, a match made in Heaven.

"He-he's," She bites off her words rather than choke on them. She looks out towards the ocean, saying softly, "You heard about the Liberty Island Ferry?"

"Yeah. Yeah, of course. " The implication she's making strikes me with shock. "I-I'm sorry."

"He went to meet an old college friend. They haven't found his-his," She stops again and stares out to sea. After a moment she turns back to me with a slight, apologetic smile, "I'm sorry. You don't need to hear the grief of a near-total stranger."

"Hey," I say with surprising speed, "bartenders hear all sorts of things - why not the ice cream man?"

She actually smiles, genuinely and with appreciation. "Thank you. I suppose I'd better take that ice cream from you before it melts."

She sits in silence as she eats the ice cream, and when she's done I hear the story of her and Harold. She doesn't linger on her pain like many people do, but on everything she loved about him. Oddly enough, this highlights and explains her pain more than concentrating on the pain could have; absence is not truly explainable but by describing what was once there.

Eventually she stops talking and the tears that had occasionally dripped while she spoke are spent. I gently, if awkwardly, pat her shoulder. She turns and gives me a grateful hug, and I wrap my arms around her in return. She pulls away after a moment, apologizing, "I'm sorry, you barely know me and here I am weeping in your arms."

She starts gathering her equipment together.

"It's alright," I say, "Everybody needs a stranger to talk to sometime."

She smiles slightly, and says sincerely, "Thank you."

When I get home that night, I wrap my wife in a hug and tell her how much I love her. I didn't even want to think how close she had been to being in the Liberty Island Ferry explosion. She was going to go there with my brother and his kids; they only didn't end up there that day because one of his kids came down with a bad flu.

Grace has been coming back regularly - sometimes painting, sometimes not - always sitting with the mourning doves that gather around her, and I can't help but fancifully think that they find her kindred in some way; a mourning dove amid mourning doves.