Another pause. “Yeah.” He isn’t sure where this is going, isn’t sure I haven’t lost it completely.

I’m not so sure myself. “That was one of our best days. I was really happy.”

“Yeah.” Through the phone his breathing quickens. “The thing is, I haven’t seen that woman in a long time, Anna. You haven’t been here for us and you know it.”

“I can do better. Let me try.”

Silence spreads through the receiver, pools around me on the bed as I wait for his answer. Finally he says, “I don’t trust you. I can’t.” The clarity in his voice is devastating. The resolution. For weeks he’s been so angry, but this is worse. He’s made a decision I can’t fight, because I’ve given him every reason to feel precisely this way. “Take care of yourself, okay?”

I feel myself teetering on a dark edge. In other moments of our marriage, he would have thrown me a rope. “Brendan, please. I can’t lose everything.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, and disconnects before I can say another word.

—

Nearly two hundred people came to the memorial service, many of them in uniform. Colleagues and friends and well-meaning strangers who’d read the story in the Chronicle and thought, There but for the grace of God go I.

I zipped myself into a dress I couldn’t feel, so high on Ativan it could have been made of knives. I read lips through huge black sunglasses while Brendan said thank you over and over. Back at the house, I positioned myself in a corner of the kitchen, turned away from the aggressively placed flowers and condolence notes, the stricken faces around the table full of casseroles and cheese platters. My supervising officer, Frank Leary, found me there, a plate of food in his hands that he didn’t even pretend to want.

“What can I say, Anna? What can anyone say about something so awful?”

His voice was usually gruff, not soft like this. I wished I could freeze him where he stood, him and everyone else in a child’s game of statue, and walk away. Instead I only nodded. “Thanks.”

“You should take as much bereavement time as you need for yourself. Don’t worry about a thing, okay?”

The wall seemed to inch nearer as he spoke. “Actually I was thinking I’d come back next week. I need something else to focus on.”

“C’mon, Anna. You don’t mean that. It’s too soon. You should only be thinking about your family right now, and taking care of yourself.”

“You don’t understand, Frank.” I could hear my voice tightening around the words and tried to slow down, to sound less desperate. “I’ll go crazy here with nothing to do. Please.”