"Juniper, I am sorry I was weak, unable to protect you." The words were lead slugs in the chamber of my mind. "I want to forget it but I can’t. I can forget you, My Life, keep haunting me in my restless dreams." A man isn't supposed to feel this cold. This suffocating darkness. The last thing I remembered was fading out in the street after the raw, hot blast on Coral Lane, the kind of heat that strips the paint off a life.

  Now? Nothing but an icy drift. I felt a phantom breeze on my skin. I forced my heavy eyelids open. Nothing but clouds. Gray, indifferent smoke. Maybe this was it. The final curtain. Maybe I was dead, and I could finally find her again. Her warmth. The thought was a sweet poison, but something pulled me back, a hook in the gut.

  I didn't know what to do, so I walked. The air felt free, but freedom had a high price tag in my line of work. A man living in that hellhole of a city always keeps his toes near the edge of the grave.

  Then, a whisper, familiar as a bullet's whistle. "Cooper Darling, stop recording. People can see us." A voice from a happier time, a ghost from the reel of my past.

  I followed the sound, and the floor beneath me turned to sand. The vast ocean washed my feet, and the memories invaded my head like unwelcome detectives. The Blue Edge Beach. Our honeymoon. I was trying to capture her smile on film, and she was trying to steal the scene, as always. The salt air tasted like regret and cheap gin.

  A new scene. A soft cough, a domestic sound lost to the years. "Achhoo… Honey thank you for the Soup, I already feel good come get into bed with me." I was in a bedroom now, the air thick with winter's bite. Our first winter. The cold had hit her hard. I'd learned to make a decent soup, a small shield against the cold. Why did my eyes feel wet? The guilt was a heavy overcoat I couldn't shrug off. I couldn't forgive myself. The dame was worth more than I was.

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  I exited that door and found myself in a sterile hospital hallway. A past conversation echoed, clean and sharp. "How many kids you want, I want two a boy and a girl, the girl will be named June and Boy Elmroot Jr." A high-stakes gamble with life itself. Doctor Karl's face, a masked poker player, telling us we had a one-percent chance. We were happy then, hopeful in the face of the odds.

  The scene shifted, a jump cut to a thundering park, the sky dark with the city's anger. "How could you do this, You let Mrs. Krishnan die, and little Vivek and Neena too. I could have forgiven you if it was me but not those who actually fight for the right. Don’t ever talk to me again, you have lost the right and the respect."

  The night I lost her. I stood outside Lawyer Surya's house, a coward taking orders, a rat in a maze, when I should have been a man doing his duty. I never heard her voice again. Years passed us like a storm passes a city, leaving nothing but the loud, sharp silence of two strangers sharing the same small life, tied by church vows and some signed legal documents.

  Then Jane. A new assignment, teaching fresh meat at the academy. She offered a warmth, a light in the dark, that mirrored Juniper's. A fatal mistake. I spent more time with Jane, losing myself in the cheap escape, while Juniper faded into the background.

  The night it all fell apart, I was in the kitchen, a cup of black coffee my only friend, thinking of Jane. Juniper's voice was a flatline. "I am going to Hospital do you want to come with me?"

  I laughed. A cold, dry sound. "Why? What good would it do to us, it’s not like years of visits have done anything for us."

  She tried to reason, but I cut her off, a knife through a bad memory. "Stop it! I am getting late, I am busy as unlike you some of us have work to do?"

  I shouldn’t have done that, I should have gone with her. Have been with her, for us and our life together but I didn’t, I sinned as I broke the vows that were meant for us.