Epilogue

I lay on the horn of my police cruiser, stick my head out the window. "Come on, Kitty Kat! Let's go!" No answer, so I lay on the horn again. "Katrina Juliet Kingston-McFuller, now! We're going to be late!"

The front door opens and my ten-year-old daughter, Katrina, scampers out with a backpack slung over one shoulder. She leaps into the backseat, and I set a course for downtown Ridgeview and Jefferson High. Through the overhead mirror, I see her dig out a book and begin to read.

"What story you on right now, kiddo?"

Silently, she holds up the book jacket. Because of Winn-Dixie.

"Ah... I remember reading that story. Third grade." A distant memory strikes me. "I sat next to your mom that entire school year."

At this, Katrina perks up. "Daddy?"

"Hmm?"

"The little girl in this book, Opal, she doesn't have a mommy either. And she's also ten years old. And since I'm also ten years old, I think I should know ten things about my mama."

I wince a little, feeling the weight of my task deeply. No way I'll be able to think of ten distinct things about Sam by the time we reach the school. "Well, how about I start you off with number 1?"

"And what's that?"

"Your mother loved you. She loved you very much."

"Like in the picture on my nightstand!" Katrina chirps. It was a shot in the hospital that Patrick gave to me after the fact, one that shows Sam gazing down at our baby with beaming love. It is a photograph frozen in time, for scarcely five minutes after it was taken, everything went to shit.

"And we're here." I swing into the parking lot of the high school, where banners are already up welcoming the Class of 2017 to their 10th-year reunion. I help Katrina out of the back. "Come on - let's go find your aunts and uncles."

We spy them rather quickly, and Katrina breaks into a run ahead of me, so that I have to almost sprint to keep up.

"Uncle Rob! Aunt Juliet!"

A very pregnant Juliet smiles down at her. "There's my goddaughter!" Her husband firmly shakes my hand.

"There you are, you sonofabitch! Do I need to make you drop and give me 20? Your sprints were a little slow!"

I smirk in bemusement. Rob Cokran is now the football coach here, and played a big part as my personal trainer, preparing me to enter the Ridgeview Police Academy and pass their physical exam.

A shriek from behind us makes us all spin around, to find a triumvirate of girls loping across the grass towards us.

"Stop. Growing!" Lindsay wails as she throws her arms around Katrina. "Auntie doesn't like it when you grow."

"I do," her husband, Patrick, mumbles to me under his breath. "She still treats Kitty Kat like she's in diapers."

I shrug. "Maternal instinct." I have long grown used to Lindsay's smothering of my child. Mostly because Ally and Elody balance her out, playing cool with my kid and letting her do her own thing. Ally fills these shoes the easiest of all, as I can already hear my daughter peppering her with questions about ghosts. When I first heard that Ally had embarked on a career as a paranormal investigator, landing her own hit HBO series in the bargain, I was more than a little shocked. But Ally told me the decision was hugely influenced by Sam, and especially the day of her accident.

"She was acting so strangely that day," Ally had told me over coffee, on a visit over to my house so she could play with Katrina. "I think she knew she was going to die that day! And I've always wondered how she knew? Like she had a premonition!"

"Oh, come on, Ally, really?" I had laughed.

"No, I'm serious! There are stories of 9/11 victims having premonitions about the attacks years before their own deaths! And President Lincoln had a dream about being assassinated just before he was!"

I am still a little skeptical about this, but to each his own. I disentangle Katrina from the hug she is getting from her Aunt Elody and corrall everybody. "Come on. Let's go find a table." And we set off laughing underneath the Washington sun.