I sounded my first siren when I was three. Riding in our town’s Santa Claus parade, tucked into the front seat between my grandfather and my father. Granddad was chief of police. Dad had just made detective. An uncle and an older cousin walked behind the cruiser, stiff in their dress uniforms, struggling not to smile.

I don’t remember ever deciding I wanted to become a cop, no more than my friends consciously decided they would grow up to marry and have children. We simply assumed that was what we would do, what we needed to complete our lives.

I enrolled in police college right out of high school. My brother had already headed off to New York to pursue acting, having never shown any interest in the “family business.” When I graduated, Dad was so proud, he didn’t stop grinning for a month. My mother says it’s a good thing he died three years later, or “what happened next” would have killed him. Maybe she’s right, but I’ll never forgive her for saying it.

“What happened next” began when my partner and I were first to a crime scene. Dawn Collins, fifteen years old, brutally raped and murdered. I’d seen murder victims before. I’d seen far worse cases than this. And yet, when I walked into that room and saw Dawn, naked and curled up in the corner, her dark hair falling over her face, the cord around her neck the only sign she hadn’t just fallen asleep, something in me snapped. Not a loud snap. Not even a hard one. Just a tiny little snip, like someone had flipped off my power switch and I just…shut down. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t process. Couldn’t react.

My partner, a seasoned constable nearing retirement, had taken it in stride, presuming I was in shock and just letting me follow him as he processed the scene, calmly explaining each step, and letting me play student bystander. By the time the others arrived, I’d snapped out of it enough to do my job.

That night, the nightmares came. I’d lived with them for over a decade by then and, usually, they were the same images played and replayed—running through the forest, running for help, help for Amy, help that would never come in time. But that night after seeing Dawn Collins, I wasn’t running. I was back in the cabin, a man’s face over mine, features contorted in laughter as I screamed. Screamed in terror, in pain—screamed for Amy, screamed for my father, for anyone.