Margaret had done it two thousand times for strangers.

She had never once had to do it for someone she loved, and it turns out — she would tell a room full of nursing students this, four years later, and it is the only part of the talk she has trouble getting through — it turns out that the skill does not transfer easily, because the entire time you are doing it, another part of you is screaming at you to stop.

Her husband David had died in 2016, a heart attack in a parking lot in Poway, seven months after he retired from thirty-four years with the San Diego Police Department.

He had left her two things that mattered.

A daughter who was the best person she knew, and a set of friendships with police officers that she had never in her life expected to use.

Michael Turner had been David’s partner for six years in the nineties and had been at their table for Thanksgiving eleven times.