Full uniform. Dark blue. Belts, radios, badges catching the light from the high gym windows.
I knew that walk. I’d know it anywhere. Slow, heavy, careful. It’s the walk of someone coming to tell you something you don’t want to hear.
My whole body went cold.
I’d spent eleven years of my marriage waiting for that walk. Every night David worked a late shift, I’d lie awake listening for a car in the driveway that wasn’t his. Two officers at the door. Hats in their hands. That was the picture I carried around in my head for over a decade.
And it never came. Not like that. David didn’t die on the job. He died in a hospital bed in our living room, of an illness that took him slowly, one piece at a time, over fourteen months.
But my body didn’t know that. My body only knew the walk.
I stood up so fast my folding chair tipped backward and clattered on the floor.
