Without a word they lined both sides of the aisle, standing at attention, forming an honor guard down the length of the church, a corridor of steady still figures with a clear path between them.

I stopped where I stood, half-turned, my bouquet forgotten in my hands.

I did not understand what was happening — I would not understand for another minute — but I understood the feeling of it, which arrived before any of the facts did.

It was the feeling of being surrounded, suddenly, by people who had come for me, or for someone I loved, in a room where minutes earlier I had felt utterly alone.

My father had left me to walk by myself, and I had steeled myself to finish that walk in isolation, and instead the doors had opened and thirty strangers in uniform had quietly arranged themselves into a wall of witness on either side of me.

I did not know yet that they had come for Ezekiel.