The officer asked if I was Amanda Pierce, and the look on his face told me before he opened his mouth that the world I knew was already gone.
George’s car had gone off the road near Morfield Pass.
He died instantly.
That was what they said.
I remember nodding as though I understood the sentence. I remember hearing my own voice ask some small mechanical question about where the body had been taken. I remember setting the grocery bag on the floor and watching the milk tip sideways against the carton of eggs. I remember the officer saying he was sorry, and I remember thinking with absurd clarity that men in uniform must practice saying those two words in some training somewhere, because he said them without hesitation and without losing the solemn expression that told me he had already seen what I was going to spend the next month trying not to imagine.
George and I had been married for fifteen years.