Caitlin was another matter.

Ten miles out of Baton Rouge, Carl could no longer detect a heartbeat in her chest. While Danny pushed the chopper’s engine beyond its operational limit, I telephoned Drew Elliott and begged him to do anything he could from Natchez. Thirty seconds later we were over Baton Rouge and boring in on Baton Rouge General. Danny started to land in their automotive parking lot, but space was tight and the risk to bystanders real. While Carl and I stared wild-eyed at each other over Caitlin’s bloody chest, Drew called back and told me to divert to Our Lady of the Lake. A med school buddy of his was a trauma surgeon there, and he was ready to get Caitlin into an OR the moment she arrived. Danny instantly aborted the parking lot landing and got us over Our Lady in less than a minute.

As we dropped toward the rooftop helipad, John Kaiser called and told me we’d been cleared to land at Baton Rouge General. I thanked him and shut off my ringer as Danny flared and settled the JetRanger dead center on the white-painted ring. Crouching against our rotor blast, a trauma team rushed to the chopper and moved Caitlin onto a gurney within ten seconds of the skids touching concrete. Carl and I followed them into the elevator, watching in stricken horror as they started large-bore IVs and searched in vain for a heartbeat. A technician diagnosed pericardial tamponade even before the doors opened on the next floor.

Drew’s buddy was scrubbed and waiting in the OR when they shoved Caitlin through the big double doors and ordered the security guard to keep me outside. Four minutes later, using a long pair of tweezers and a portable fluoroscope, the surgeon pulled a deformed .22 slug out of Caitlin’s heart with as little trouble as a boy pulling a doodlebug from a hole with a stick.

Then he declared her dead.

She’d apparently been dead when they bundled her off the chopper. The surgeon had only opened her chest because the nature of her injury sometimes offered hope of an “exceptional save.” There was also the unspoken reality that the doctor had been doing Drew a favor.

When I close my eyes, I still see Drew’s friend coming through the double doors, pulling off his mask, and reciting his stock speech with solicitous eyes: Mr. Cage, your wife was shot, as you probably know. The bullet struck her heart. We tried every means at our disposal to resuscitate her, but in spite of our best efforts, she died a few minutes ago. I’m sorry.

“She’s not my wife,” I said, which was legally true but made no sense or difference to the well-meaning surgeon.

He apologized again, and I mumbled that he should forget it while it struck me that no matter what the law says, I am twice widowed, which must be a fairly rare mark of distinction among forty-five-year-old American men these days.

Carl Sims put his hands on my shoulders and in a cracked voice said he was sorry. Then he told me that Danny McDavitt would have been there, but the hospital had asked him to move the chopper to a secondary landing site near the car lot. Then, to my surprise, the trauma surgeon spoke some more, telling us things that brought tears to our eyes. He told us that Caitlin was brave, even heroic, and that she and my father had used an ingenious method to try to relieve her cardiac distress. The remarkable thing, the surgeon said, was that Caitlin must have done all the cutting and probing herself. For since my father’s hands had been cuffed, he could not have done it. Had Dad not gone into a diabetic coma, he might have kept Caitlin alive long enough for the trauma team to save her.

I was in no mood to hear praise for my father, and I did not react well. The surgeon shook my hand and bade me farewell, and then a nurse came out with a hospital bag containing Caitlin’s personal effects.

All that happened twenty minutes ago.

Now I stand alone with Caitlin in the OR—“viewing the remains,” as I heard a nurse say, in what she thought was a whisper. Someone had draped a sheet over Caitlin’s body, covering her to the neck, but I removed it as soon as the nurse left me alone with her.

Standing in the awful silence, I relearn lessons that I learned when my wife died, then forgot out of self-preservation. Lesson one: the stillest thing in the world is the corpse of someone you loved. A hunk of cold granite seems more alive than a dead human being. You don’t expect a stone to move. A person robbed of all motion and cold to the touch is the most alien object in the world. Natural instinct drives us away from the decaying body, and quickly. Yet love compels us forward, to kiss the empty vessel of the soul departed.

Lesson two: there are many fates worse than death. The most common is surviving the death of a loved one. For the dead, all questions have been answered or made irrelevant. For the survivor, some questions have been rendered unanswerable. When my wife died, I had months to prepare, yet even then the final reality stunned me. But Caitlin has been snatched away like the son of my deer-hunting friend: alive and vital one moment, permanently AWOL the next. The cruelty in this feels personal. Many in my circumstance would lay it at the door of God. Yet I know where the true blame lies.

But that is for later. . . .

For now I must say good-bye. Unlike my wife, Caitlin is beautiful in death. Sarah was beautiful in life, but cancer stripped away her loveliness piecemeal until all that remained was a living husk. On this table, Caitlin reminds me of stories from London during the Blitz, when lovers seated on park benches had the life snatched out of them by the blast of a V-2 rocket they never even heard. The bullet wound in her chest is obscene, as is the thoracotomy window the surgeon cut in her side, but the rest of her body bears no mark. Her skin was always china white, and with her veil of black hair, she looks more like an actress playing a murder victim in a film than an actual corpse. For a surreal moment, I half expect someone to yell “Cut” and to hear the footsteps of the crew rushing in to congratulate her and give her sips of Perrier.

But no one does.

Looking closer, I see that Caitlin died without a trace of makeup on. Jordan Glass’s influence, no doubt. Beneath her frozen perfection, though, I sense that the process of decay has already begun. Her cheeks sag in a way they never did in life, and her breasts lie flatter than I ever saw them. This woman will never bear a child, never nurse one, or watch one take its first steps. She will never sit proudly at a graduation, or grow old and touch the wrinkles on her face with exquisite sadness over slowly encroaching mortality. For Caitlin Masters, mortality arrived all at once, in a tiny package of lead and copper that rearranged her vibrant heart just enough to smother it in its own blood.

Questions swim like ravenous fish below the surface of my consciousness, yet something of almost terrifying power holds them at a certain depth. Since Caitlin cannot answer questions for me, the fish must wait to be fed. Some part of me understands that this will be the last time I spend with Caitlin in her natural state. As a prosecuting attorney, I know too well the clinical rituals that follow death. After this brief lacuna in the rush of events, she will be violated by the pathologist’s saw; her organs will be weighed upon the scales; her blood will be pumped out by the embalmers and replaced by chemicals; all the other ghoulish sequelae we inflict upon the dead will follow in train. Yet all this leaves me strangely cold. My temporarily cauterized nerve endings transmit no signals of agony; my brain experiences revulsion as a concept, not an emotion. I know that pain will come—in minutes perhaps, or hours, or even days—and when it does, I may not be able to endure it.

But for now . . .

I reach out and take the cold hand of the woman I would have married next week, had my father not taken leave of his senses, and gently squeeze it as I did in life. She does not squeeze back, but I still remember with absolute clarity what the reciprocal squeeze felt like: the proof of love returned.