I would never tell anyone, obviously. It was my secret. I’m not one for superstition, but I know what I saw.

It swooped down from the sky, made a clean little arc right in front of me and perched onto my wrist, just as I reached out to unlock the car door. Then it looked at me. A crow so glossy the black became blue, like a spill of oil on tarmac. Its eyes were even blacker, and it just… looked at me. And I did the same. It tilted its head one way and the other and then it flew off, its talons sharp on my skin.

It wasn’t really the kind of thing that happened. Had my life become so boring that I was now some ageing old fool in his front yard, convincing himself the animals were talking to him? But… crows just didn’t behave like that. And they certainly didn’t do it to someone like me.

After almost two decades of service as a US Navy SEAL admiral, I don’t believe that anything is random. If your team is out on special reconnaissance, no detail is too small to ignore. I know men who have narrowly avoided death because they were alert enough to notice the sudden drop of pressure in a room, to notice that the man at the entrance had a slight Syrian inflection to his Arabic, to notice that all the houses had open curtains except for one.

So what the hell did the crow mean?

I didn’t tell anyone and kept it as my secret, half wondering if I’d dreamt it, half wondering if it was an omen. Maybe my mind was going soft. There was a time when I was happily operating on a handful of hours a night, engaging in high-risk capture missions by day and secret ops by night. I was used to the tension, the surgical precision of strikes, the cortisol pumping through me. And now, without the weight of a weapon in my hand, I felt so light I could float away.

I found my way to the local Police department where I tried on the new title of ‘detective’ and committed to a bunch of paperwork to do each day. It was a step away from the raw edge of things, sure. But it was steady income, a relatively predictable schedule and something to do myself so I didn’t just sit in this big empty house all day and look at Clara’s old things. I was 42 years old for Christ’s sake, and as ripped as I liked to think I was some days, I wasn’t getting any younger. After the September mission, the best I could have hoped for was to while away my days at the in law enforcement and then retire comfortably. I was fine.

Until the crow turned up.

I can’t explain it.

I grabbed my phone and answered, pressing it to my ear and holding it there with my shoulder while I clumsily put on my shoes.

“You heading over here? Cochran’s still stuck with that interrogation halfway across town…”

I grumbled.

“Yeah yeah, I’ll be there. Give me ten,” I said and hung up. I straightened up, then eyed the bottle of Jack on the kitchen counter. I was a washed up Irish police detective with a dead wife and a drinking problem. Christ, could I be any more of a stereotype? I resisted the urge to take a swig or three before heading out. There were some medals of honor rattling around in my bottom drawer, mixed in with Clara’s old things. I had never been a blowhard about what I had achieved in my years of service. Valor was never the point. But it was days like these that I would have killed for a bit of that shine; a bit of that old pride I had felt not so long ago.

I grabbed my keys and left. Maybe I hovered my hand over my car door for a split second longer than necessary, maybe I didn’t. The crow hadn’t returned, but I could still see every detail of his blue-black feathers in my mind. I got inside, turned the ignition and drove in silence. I’m not superstitious. But I could tell it was on everyone’s mind. Maybe Clara had died because of me. I had left her here and it wasn’t breast cancer, but loneliness that got her. Three days before I was due to return home after the September mission was canned and everything was hushed over, Clara quietly went to sleep and didn’t wake up again, like a princess in a story book. It was hard not to take it personally. I’m not a superstitious man. But my life sure did have the feeling of a fairy tale this last little while.

This area had a drug case every six months and last week I closed a case of cellphone theft from a local weekend dog show. I had moved here with Clara specifically because there was so little crime. I wondered if she was laughing at me somewhere now, laughing at how ridiculous it all turned out for me. The roads were quiet this time of day and I’d be there is a few minutes, easy. House burglaries were the department’s staple but my take on the matter was that it was almost always opportunistic crimes, drunk kids, stuff like that. I could do this job in my sleep.

Without Clara, the boys from the last Mission were all I had. And they were moving on too. Hell, I had encouraged them to. Hugo and Max were like my own sons, and they’d found girls to settle down with pretty quick. David, bless his heart, was now shacked up with an older woman and honestly, once we saw them together, we all wondered why we had never thought of it before. Noah was still single but I knew him, Noah was the kind for the long game. I knew he probably had something cooking behind the scenes and would surprise us all one day with a wife, a golden lab and a fresh mortgage in this very neighborhood.

And me? Well, I was on the other end of all that. I don’t know how many fresh beginnings any one man gets in life. But I felt like I was running thin on them for sure. I was always playing dad for the younger guys in the team, and hey, I didn’t mind. I liked it. I always told them, men like us need woman. They keep us sane. Give us direction. It’s an old fashioned opinion, but I knew from first hand experience that more than half of what I achieved could never have happened without Clara in my life.

Of course, she wasn’t in my life anymore. I would never tell the boys that some days I wished I had never met Clara at all. I would never tell them that when you fall in love, when you build your life with another person, you grow roots that hurt when they’re pulled up. The edges of my life had grown right up close to the edges of hers. And when she passed away, I suddenly felt misshapen. Like all the things I had built in life for her, around her, with her, suddenly didn’t make sense without her there with me. The house we shared suddenly looked big and stupid and pointless. The future we planned together seemed too big now for just one person. I still hadn’t decided if I should keep sleeping on my side of the bed of whether I should sleep in the middle and take up all the space there was. Most nights, I just didn’t sleep.

I arrived at the location. A house much like my own, but done up nicer. This was the fancier side of an already fancy neighborhood. It was filled with architects and lawyers and busy parents who seemed to send their kids to boarding school in Europe so they didn’t wear down the front lawn too much. It had those little circular bushes in the driveway. Things were clean, and quiet. I parked, slammed the car door behind me and adjusted my belt as I walked over to my colleague.

“Burglary last night,” he said, “resident woke up to find front door tampered with and documents stolen from her home office.”

“Well good morning to you too, Eliot,” I said and narrowed my eyes in the sunlight to look at the house.

He smiled at me and we walked over to the front door together, where I could see he had already taken prints on the mauled surface of the door panel. I kneeled and had a look at the silvery sheen and could see already that there was a snowball’s chance of getting a complete print from that.

“You chat to her?” I said.

He gestured towards the house and then I could hear a soft female voice from inside. “She’s on the phone with her insurance.”

“Noted.”

I put my hands in my pocket and looked up and then down the street. I couldn’t see them, but I just knew that there had to be a dozen pairs of eyes peeking over us right now. Before I could say more I heard the voice coming closer and soon she was at the door. Not a woman, but a… statue. A line drawing from a film noir poster. Her hair was so black it almost seemed blue. Her eyes were blacker. She stared at me and I stared at her. And for a moment, I couldn’t speak.