Dagger

Love and Pain

(Pt. 3, preceded by “Creep” and “Mother”)

June 2026

“It’s just that I will never hear her sing again.”

It’s been months since I’ve spoken to Mom.

She wants to heal, I want her to heal, and in our last conversation we agreed that I wouldn’t reach out unless I had significant news. I haven’t, because I don’t.

There’s a strong compulsion to check in, to see if everything is okay. Some part of me thinks that she may expect a text every so often, that to do so is not only a professional obligation but that of one human to another. My silence is, perhaps, a misguided attempt at sparing her additional pain, sparing the moment where her phone notifies her of a message, the not-insignificant dopamine rush of the moment set further ablaze by the revealing of the sender.

My name is synonymous with the worst day of her life.

Mom only knows me because I am the detective who investigates her daughter’s death, and all the unpleasantness that accompanies it. We talk of other things, and I do believe our conversations have been helpful, but this will always be the feeling that my name invokes.

If life has granted her a period of peace, I don’t want to disturb it. I don’t want to return her to day one. I don’t want to provide false hope, and I don’t want to destroy it altogether. Perhaps this is selfish. Perhaps it is cowardice. But I don’t see a good way around it.

In April, I met with another prosecutor, the third so far in what will undoubtedly be an endless montage of skeptical faces. He is hard to age, and could be as old as late 40s. He wears dark-colored slacks, too baggy for his sedentary legs, their waist resting an easy inch over his bellybutton. Tucked into the belt-less waistband is a black and white vertically striped shirt, buttoned to the neck and bereft of the bowtie or skinny piano key ribbon that would be most fitting. Bereft of a tie at all.

His face is all sharp angles, two brass circle spectacles resting upon the prominent triangle of his nose, secured to his ears by two inverted sled-runner hooks. His salt-and-pepper hair is swept back, tight to the skull down the middle but beginning to stray at the ends.

He is available by cell most of the time, but may not answer between 10pm and 2am because that is when he plays video games. He may be taking a new job in May, but he’s happy to help us out while he’s here. This is one of hundreds of individual cases that will be presented to him this year. Many of them are easier to prove. He’s a genuinely helpful guy that’s overworked and under-supported.

He’s a nice guy, but as reluctant to try this one as his colleagues have been. A “case” like this is low-profile, a mountain of work that will yield little-to-no professional acclaim, no flashy sentence, and no Lifetime movie. A flat-out homicide is “sexy”. An overdose death (a homicide in some states, but not in ours) is a lot of headache with no tangible reward.

At one point during the meeting, he places the tip of his ballpoint pen into his left ear, using his thumb and forefinger to twist it back and forth several times before removing it, bringing it under his nose, and inhaling. He does this with a nonchalance befitting a sip of coffee, a crack of the knuckles, or a clearing of the throat.

He does it with a nonchalance that causes me to wonder if I saw it.

I did.

And so did my co-workers.

He politely declines to prosecute the boyfriend at this time. This avenue is closed. Boyfriend will not be held accountable by any legal standard.

This would be my update, and so I leave her be.

The other news I have for her is that I am retiring in May.

To this point, I am her only known link between the legal system and the real world, and have been putting this announcement off for months. A year ago, it didn’t seem relevant. Six months ago, it seemed a lifetime away. Now it is here, and she must be told.

I call her from the Florida neighborhood where we are staying until our new home is being finished. I pace as we talk, the chirping of birds and the (imagined?) swish of palm fronds a gleaming line between the two worlds in which my feet now tread.

Her texts contained an urgency that I translated into anger, but her voice contains none of the vitriol that I conjured from the guilt of leaving her behind. She seems grateful to hear from me, but as sad as I’ve heard her. Her voice is unsubstantial, a thin gauze sail tattering in the gale of her emotions. The disparate fray that weaves its way into her cadence borders on the frantic, a barely-contained “help me, I that cannot be helped” that shatters the illusion that she’s “probably doing okay”.

I tell her that I am retiring, that I have moved to Florida. I hear her breath catch, and press on before the emotion can dump, telling her that my replacement will be able to answer any questions pertaining to investigative matters, that my replacement is the detective who showed me the ropes for this position, that he’s a guy who gets it, who cares about human beings, and that he’s a better investigator than I am. I know her, and I’m trying to answer all of her questions before she has to ask them, to shore up the wall of her self-control before panic tears it asunder.

I will continue to be available, by personal phone if need be. I just won’t have access to a lot of what I used to have access to. She is happy for me, and tells me about her time with Daughter in Florida, complete with recommendations on things to do and places to see.

Daughter won a singing competition in Florida. Mom will never hear her sing again.

She saw that boyfriend was arrested this month (by another agency, on trespassing and drug charges unrelated to Daughter’s death) and she started to spiral. The man who watched her daughter die so that he wouldn’t get “in trouble” walks free, criminally unrepentant and perhaps morally so as well. The mechanisms that suppress her rage, hatred, and disgust for him are strained beyond their capacity. She racks her brain in a vain attempt to find a new angle for the investigation, gleaning her memory to find something that I may be able to use to hold his feet to the proverbial fire, to hold accountable the man who ended the life she lived before an ambulance pulled out of her driveway with her lifeless daughter in the back.

She never questions my work. Not once. She’s never once said ANYTHING that made me believe she’s dissatisfied with the investigation. She knows the facts, maybe as well as I do, and she’s aware of the prosecutor’s position. She used to work in a courthouse, understands the imperfections in our collective notions of justice, understands that sometimes bad men walk free and that sometimes good men do not.

But it still hurts.

And the paper trail tells her that for Boyfriend, the party goes on. She would like to understand how it is that he continues to walk freely with a criminal record like the one he possesses, how he continues to be arrested over and over again without consequence. I don’t have good answers for this.

She relays a few details that I didn’t know, hoping they will prove useful on convincing someone to go after this case. She tells me of how Daughter asked several times if she could bring Boyfriend to the house, how since Mom and Daughter were staying with Mom’s sister, Mom was reluctant to say yes, but finally acquiesced on the morning of that day. Mom and Mom’s sister were at a doctor’s appointment and Mom texted Daughter when they left. Daughter, a “prolific texter”, didn’t answer, and Mom had a bad feeling, continuing to text and call while she and her sister were at lunch, but receiving no reply. She returned home, set her purse on the counter, and noticed an ambulance pulling into the driveway a short time later. For fifteen minutes, she was one fifteen stairs and less than fifty feet away from her dead or dying daughter. Boyfriend never yelled up to them, never came outside, never said a word.

He knew they were home and didn’t say a goddamned word.

“Maybe she was still alive.”

“Maybe if I’d’ve come home sooner, when I had the feeling…”

It’s so simple to her, the tragic result proof to her that her instinct was real, that it should’ve been followed.

That maybe she could’ve done something.

What are the words that can absolve her of this guilt? And where does it come from? Must all those aggrieved have their anguish so twisted, perversely forged into this masochistic knife?

Has she not suffered enough?

She knows it’s not her fault, and she knows that I know it’s not her fault, but this loss is too catastrophic for self-absolution. She doesn’t dare lay claim to self-forgiveness, not from a consequence of such devastating magnitude.

She needs to hear it from someone she can trust on the matter. She knows very little about me, and vice versa. She’s never even seen my face. But she knows that I am trying to understand, that I have spent some time with unnatural death, and that I am truly sorry for her pain.

She knows that I care.

I despise a hollow word, a lackluster and awkward condolence, and cannot bring myself to conjure either. I feel anger at whatever force has gripped her mind, that has turned her upon herself on top of all that she has already suffered. Without conscience thought, I just say her name, once, a hint of admonishment in my tone, a clear challenge to the notion that she is responsible for this tragedy.

She takes over from there.

“Y’know, I guess it’s pretty arrogant to think I could’ve stopped this.”

We agree that for her to justly shoulder this responsibility would require that she admit to being all-knowing, that to believe she could have stopped this with the information she had at the time would be to claim an omnipotence that exceeds her capability. As she speaks, her voice regains its composure, her defiance-of-despair rushing to fill the cracks of the perforated timbre of moments before. The revelation that she is “merely” human seems to place her back on solid ground.

She takes a deep breath and sighs it out. Defiance, then acceptance of what is, and the strength to let go. For now, he is gone again.

For now, she is closer to whole.

I have to go. I have an appointment that I’m already late for. She hopes that I enjoy retirement. I hope that she finds peace.

I think about all I’ve learned from this woman, about gratitude, about hope and grief and loss, about the bizarre and powerful nature of human connection. Our lives are now in some way inextricably linked, the lessons of her story now a permanent feature of my internal makeup.

Mom’s heart is different.

Her pain is real, a dagger finely honed by the intensity of her capacity to love, and it spurs on the legions of rage, hatred, and despair that live within her, that live within us all.

But it is no match for the light within her.

Mom’s heart is different.

And I’m grateful to have witnessed it.

Thanks for reading.