The Steel Kiss

She’d argued with him, tried to pry open the clamshell of his determination. But he’d been adamant, irritatingly deaf to the bullet points of her side of the debate.

“Everything comes to an end,” her father had told her one crisp, glary Saturday afternoon as he took a breather from their joint project of installing a rebuilt carburetor in their Camaro. “It’s the way of the world and it’s better to accept that. Dignify, don’t demean.” Herman Sachs was, at the time, on a leave of absence from the NYPD, undergoing a series of cancer treatments. Sachs accepted almost everything the calm, shrewd and humorous man had taught and told her, but she furiously declined to buy either of those points—the ending and the acceptance—despite the fact that he proved himself right, at least as to the first, by dying six weeks later.

Forget it. Forget Lincoln.

You’ve got work to do. Staring at the evidence charts.