Broken Heart 2

That weekend, Levi and his children received a surprise visit from his cousin, Alex and Alex's wife, Alison.

"Alex and Alison are here!" Lydia exclaimed, running to meet her new visitors.

"Hey, sweetheart!" Alison said, giving the little girl a fierce hug, which was a bit awkward with her eight-months-pregnant belly in the way.

"It's almost time for your baby to be born, isn't it?" asked Lydia.

"That's right!" Alison replied. "Just four more weeks!"

"And then Dominic and me can play with it!" said Lydia.

"Oh, no. Not right away." Alison laughed. "Babies are too little to do anything much but sleep and eat when they're first born, but when it's a little bit older, you and your brother can play with it, if you're very gentle."

"She's so precocious," Alison complimented Levi's young daughter.

"She is," he agreed.

Alex and Alison visited for several hours. After dinner, they were all sitting in the living room watching television when the program they were watching was interrupted by a news bulletin. An airplane headed for New York City had exploded in midair, killing all passengers on board. When the flight's number was mentioned, all the blood drained from Levi's face.

"That was Trina's flight number...' he gasped.

"Words seem insufficient at a time like this," Nathaniel said to his partner and best friend. Levi and all the other family members of the doomed passengers had been officially notified of the disaster, and recovery teams were now sorting through the wreckage and retrieving the bodies and any valuables worth keeping. The remains would be stored in a makeshift morgue at a local hospital until they could all be identified and released to the responsible parties.

"I find it strange that I cannot even cry," Levi remarked. "I feel only numbness, a sense of unreality, as if I know that I will awaken at any moment and find that this has been but a horrible nightmare."

"You and I have both worked with the survivors of victims of tragedies long enough to know that what you feel is typical," Nathaniel replied. "Although I realize that that fact gives little consolation when you're going through it yourself."

"Yes," Levi agreed. Following such a loss, the first reaction was shock, and once the shock wore off, a deep, aching sorrow, a paralyzing grief, would follow. Levi knew the cycle all too well, but for him, the challenge would be to not only manage his own emotions, but also to provide Lydia and Dominic with the comfort and support they would need in the weeks and months to come. They were both much too young to fully grasp the magnitude of what had happened, but as they got older, they would understand much more clearly. Levi would have to be both mother and father to them from now on, and that thought completely overwhelmed him.

The days seemed to pass seamlessly, blending one into another as he went about his daily tasks, doing his routine investigative work as he waited for Mr. Williams to send him out of town on his next assignment, picking Lydia and Dominic up from child care every evening, patiently answering their questions as best he could, feeding them, playing with them, reading to them, putting them to bed, drying their tears.

When the harsh reality finally hit him, as he'd known it eventually would, it washed over him like a tidal wave, threatening to block every other structure from his mind except for the terrible finality of the knowledge that he would never see her face nor hear her voice again, that he'd never hold her hand and walk along the beach with her, that he'd never make love to her and then hold her in his arms until he could hear her gentle snoring, ever again. The crushing grief that brought him was like no pain he'd ever felt before.

Days, or possibly even weeks, he couldn't be sure which, after the tragedy, Mr. Williams asked to see him in his office. He entered to find that, to his surprise, May Walker had also been summoned.

"The passenger list of the recently destroyed airplane has been released," Mr. Williams began. "The list includes the name Franz Mueller, which, as you and I know, Mr. Kogan, is one of the pseudonyms used by Reinhardt Gutmann. As we all know, Mr. Smith is currently out of town visiting his sick aunt, so I am sending the two of you to the crash site to help with the recovery effort, in case any information related to Mr. Gutmann and his mission turns up."

Levi looked at May in disbelief. How on earth would he be able to endure her company for the length of time it would take for this case to be solved?