They were at Constellation Park, wandering among the tide pools, crouching down to run a finger along the rippled leg of an orange starfish or the fleshy purple belly of an anemone, when it happened. He said, “Maybe this is an annoying thing to ask,” and her finger slipped into the poisonous bloom of an anemone, so it shrank, contracting its tentacles into what looked like a puckered mouth. She stood and sighed and readied herself for what was coming, and said, “Go ahead.” But he surprised her by asking a different question, one that unbalanced her enough that her foot slipped on some seaweed and she dropped calf-deep into the water: “Why did you become a cop?”

She could never find the right words in response to this question. It was like trying to explain the impossible ingredients that went into a medicine. The batons and the pepper spray and the bullets and the tear-streaked faces she saw on television and social media made her feel sick enough to puke poison. Taking some of that power back with a badge of her own seemed like its own kind of cure. To serve and protect a community instead of beat it into submission. But alongside all the heavy but honest moralizing, there was also a simple explanation. Simple and silly: she was obsessed with mystery novels and detective shows.

Her mother had been strict with her as a child, making her go to Bible study and volunteer at the food pantry and maintain perfect grades and finish a daily list of chores. Nora’s busyness and discipline and severe behavior hadn’t helped her social life, so reading was her constant escape. She visited the library weekly. Some of the best friends of her childhood were Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and Easy Rawlins. The tidiness of their plotted structure appealed to her greatly. Every mystery began with a mess and concluded with the mess getting cleaned up. The math and predictability of the storytelling made sense in a way that life never did.

She and Jack made a mess together, a beautiful mess, when she got pregnant. Marriage seemed like the best way to clean it up, but still she hesitated. When she said they came from different worlds, she didn’t just mean that they lived hundreds of miles apart. Then there was the professional problem. She had just been named a detective, and he was finishing up his doctorate. Presumably he would be going on the job market soon and applying to postdoc gigs across the country. But he told her not to worry. He would move to Seattle, and they would figure things out. He would apply to local institutions, no problem. As long as they had each other—that’s what mattered. “Why do you have to be such a sweet idiot?” she said to him when he improvised a ring out of a long blade of grass and tied it around her finger.