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“I wanted to.”

“That’s very sweet. Thank you.”

Amanda handed the just filled wine stem to Matt, then touched hers to it.

“Salute,” she said.

Matt smiled, said, “Salute,” then took a sip.

He looked at the wine bottle—Nice red, he thought, glancing at the label—then noticed the folded sheets of paper beside it.

She saw where he was looking and reached over for the papers. She held them out to him.

“What’s this?”

“I’m afraid something we need to discuss. Again . . .”

Matt put his glass down. He unfolded the pages.

Oh shit, he thought, immediately recognizing what they were.

[ TWO ]

It had taken Matt a great deal of effort to get Amanda’s attention when he first tried courting her. She initially had refused his overtures. Amanda, even though she had known Matt’s sister since college, told him that she could not become involved romantically with a cop.

It wasn’t, she said, that she did not admire cops—she, in fact, held them in high regard, even loved them. Especially because her father had been one. He had retired on a medical disability after taking a bullet to the knee while off duty and in the course of stopping a robber.

The reason, Amanda said, was that she did not want to again live with the daily fear. Her family always had wondered if when they watched him leave the house for work if that would be the last they saw him alive.

But Matt had been relentless in his pursuit. And eventually Amanda relented.

Her worrying about his safety, however, did not go away. It caused her to consider what-ifs. Her father had taught her how to approach a problem from both a best-case scenario and a worst-case—Hope for the best but plan for the worst—and to consider the latter, she had written an obituary as if it had been crafted by Matt’s friend Mickey O’Hara.

Amanda had given it to Matt in hopes that it might cause him to see things differently.

—

Now Matt, his eyes skimming the obit, remembered it painfully well.

The Wyatt Earp of the Main Line:

KILLED IN THE LINE OF DUTY

Homicide Sergeant Matthew M. Payne, 31, Faithfully Served Family and Philly—and Paid the Ultimate Price.

By Michael J. O’Hara

Staff Writer, Philly News Now

Photographs courtesy of the Family and Michael J. O’Hara

PHILADELPHIA—The City of Brotherly Love grieves today at the loss of one of its finest citizens and public servants. Sergeant Matthew Mark Payne, a nine-year veteran of the Philadelphia Police Department, well known as the “Wyatt Earp of the Main Line,” was gunned down last week in a Kensington alleyway as he dragged out a fellow officer who’d been wounded in an ambush.

Payne’s heroic act amid a barrage of bullets sealed, right up until his last breath, his long-held reputation as a brave, loyal, and honorable officer and gentleman.

Friends and family say that part of what made Payne such an outstanding civil servant, one who personified the department’s motto of Honor, Integrity, Sacrifice, was that he did not have to do the job.

He chose to do it.