I remember every second of that April morning with a clarity I have for almost nothing else.

I remember I was on the porch when the car pulled up, a plain sedan, and I remember that I knew — you always know, every military spouse knows, the sight of two people in that uniform walking up a path is the one thing you spend the whole marriage praying not to see.

My knees went before they reached the steps.

One of them caught my elbow.

They were kind, unbearably kind, in the practiced gentle way of people who do this terrible thing for a living, and they said the words, and the words meant nothing and everything, and behind me in the doorway my mother said, “Oh, is everything all right?” — because she genuinely did not understand what she was looking at, because in her version of my life Niko was a consultant and nobody sends two officers in dress blues to tell you a consultant is dead.

I had to explain it to her later, in small words, and even then I could see her struggling to make it fit, this fact that did not match the shape of the son-in-law she’d filed away as unimpressive.