It had been a while since he had put flowers on his baby sister's grave.

It was next to those of his parents, of course. And his grandparents. There were Baggins graves all over the place. It made him profoundly uneasy.

And he remembered, for the first time in years, the soft form of his prematurely newborn sister lying in his nine-year-old arms, how she had opened her eyes for a single moment, and they seemed to look right into his, and the wee fingers curled about his as though in blessing, before leaving him and her parents forever.

And then he spied something lying on the tiny grave. A flower-bulb.

He did not know what kind it was. But he knew precisely what to do with it.

Three weeks later he came back to find a beautiful tall lily growing on the grave. An amaryllis. Her namesake flower.

Gently he tilted the red and white streaked flower up to his own face, and it seemed he heard a baby's cooing issuing from it, very briefly.

Thank you, he said to it, and walked away whistling.

You are welcome, Petal thought from her hiding-place, as she wistfully watched him go.