Leah Hawkins was the longtime mistress of Mark Ballard, the city manager. On July 19 she and Mark were both thirty-four and had been together for about seven years. He had come to town after college and five years of working in city government in Denver. He was handsome, about an inch taller than Leah was. He was steady, and he was married.

His wife was a beautiful, sweet, and adoring person named Marcia. Mark had met her in college at the University of Tennessee, and they had married at the end of their senior year. Shortly after their move to Denver, Marcia was in a car accident that left her hospitalized with a couple of broken bones in her legs. She seemed to be doing well for a time, but when the schedule called for her to begin physical therapy, she couldn’t do it. She had a continuing weakness unusual in a young, healthy woman. The doctors began doing tests, and one of them revealed the presence of creatine kinase in her blood. Her biopsy, neurological tests, and imaging were consistent. She had muscular dystrophy.

When Leah Hawkins was a state police officer in Longmont, she and her partner brought an injured suspect to the hospital in Denver where Marcia Ballard was receiving treatment. While Leah was in the cafeteria getting coffee for herself and her partner, she met Mark Ballard. He told her about his wife in the first few minutes, so there had never been a second when their relationship had been the familiar one—no cheating husband pretending to Leah that he was single until after she was in love, no extenuating circumstances, no pretense that he would ever divorce Marcia and marry Leah, or that Marcia’s death was imminent. Marcia was young and had excellent medical care, so there was every chance that she would be around for a long time. When Leah stopped by the next week to get coffee for herself and her partner, Mark even took Leah into Marcia’s room to introduce her.

Leah had seen all of it, and her police officer mind had not been a place where illusions could flourish. Mark Ballard was permanently married to a beautiful young woman. It was true that she was so weak and frail that sex was already a fading memory, and that he functioned as her friend and caregiver, but that wasn’t what he was. He was her husband. And sometimes it seemed to Leah that the absence of physical contact between the married couple made them closer because they both so intently missed and desired it. The atmosphere of erotic despair around them was so thick that Leah felt it with them.