He started backing toward the side door — and it opened before he reached it, and Detective Reyes stepped through it with three uniformed officers behind him.

“Nobody leaves,” Reyes said, and his voice carried the length of the room.

“Damon.

Step away from that door.”

Reyes had been my late husband’s closest friend, thirty years on the force, and the one person I had thought to call that morning when Veronica first gasped out the word burn.

I had texted him from the funeral-home parking lot, before the service, and asked him — quietly, with no proof and nothing but a nurse’s certainty and a child’s terror to go on — to put a hold on the cremation until someone could look.

He had done it.