We sat like that for a long time, until she finally opened her eyes. “So talk to me,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. But then I had no idea what to say.

“Tell me more about yourself.”

I gave her the whole rundown. Growing up in the Detroit suburbs, my mother dying when I was eight years old. My old man getting up every morning to work for Ford Motors. Going to single-A ball right out of high school, four years in the minors without a call-up. Good hands behind the plate, but struck out too much. Went after too many bad pitches.

And then being a cop in Detroit for eight years. Getting married and living in that little brick house in Redford. I stopped when I got to the part about Franklin, my old partner.

“Can we move to the bed?” she said. “My ass is getting cold on this floor.”

We got up onto the bed, under the thick down comforter. She was finally close to me again. I could feel her soft skin and the heat from her body.

I told her about that summer night in Detroit. Tracking down the man who was harassing people at the hospital. His apartment with the aluminum foil all over the walls. Then the gun he pulled out from under the table, the gun he had found in the Dumpster. It was an Uzi, the gun of choice in Detroit in the mid-1980s.

“I watched my partner die,” I said. “He was on the floor next to me. I watched the lights go out in his eyes.”

“It doesn’t sound like you had any chance to stop it.”

“I’ve replayed it in my mind a thousand times,” I said. “Ten thousand times. I could have drawn on that guy. I could have at least tried.”

She shook her head. “No way. He already had the gun pointed at you.”

“He was spaced out, Natalie. I might have been able to beat him.”

“Just keep going. What happened next?”

I told her about my own injuries. Three bullets, one in the rotator cuff, the other nicking the top of the lung, the last one bouncing around like a pinball and ending up next to my heart. I showed her my scars. I told her that the last bullet, the one by my heart, was still there.