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two weeks before the funeral

Alex was dead.

The police didn’t say it in so many words, but they didn’t have to.

The search and rescue effort was massive. For three days and two nights police boats crisscrossed the Hudson, aircraft scoured the coastline, and divers searched the murky waters.

The governor kept her word. The state police were out in force. They were joined by local cops, the County Sheriff, an NYPD harbor launch, even the Coast Guard.

All to no avail.

On Friday evening Sergeant Collins broke the news to me.

“Madam Mayor, I’m confident that if your husband was out there in need of assistance, we would have found him by now,” he said in perfect textbook cop-speak.

“So, you’re saying he drowned,” I said. “He’s dead.”

“Officially he is still missing, but realistically, he couldn’t possibly have survived in the water these past sixty hours,” Collins said. “We are transitioning from search and rescue to a recovery operation.”

“My family needs closure,” I said. “How long do you think it will be before the recovery team finds his body?”

“It’s difficult to predict. The current moves fast, and the river doesn’t always give up its victims right away. It could be days, weeks, even months.”

He didn’t have to add “or never.”

“One more thing, ma’am. I’d like to send a unit to your house at your earliest convenience.” He paused, and his eyes apologized for what he was about to say. “We’ll need some of Dr. Dunn’s personal items for DNA testing.”

It was standard procedure for missing persons. I knew it well from my years at the DA’s office. Strictly business. Until you’re on the receiving end.

The finality of it was soul crushing. I could barely speak. I managed to choke out a few words. “Tomorrow morning.”

“I’m deeply sorry for your loss,” he said.

“Thank you, Sergeant Collins.”

He turned, and I watched him walk away. He had told me over the course of our time together that he was married with three young children. I imagined that a few hours from now he’d be pulling into his driveway, his wife would call out, “Daddy’s home,” and as soon as he walked through the front door his kids would pounce on him and wrestle him to the ground.

It was just a fleeting notion. Maybe that’s not the way things were at the Collins home. But it’s the way they had been at ours.

Within hours all the resources that had been mounted to find Alex packed up, and by the weekend the only sign of police presence was a single harbor unit searching the shoreline in all the logical places where a body might float ashore.

But it wasn’t over. I still had to deal with the press. They were relentless. I’m just a small-town mayor, and Alex was the head of a hospital most people never heard of, but despite our relative obscurity, his disappearance was big news. Not just in the New York area but around the country and across social media.

Early on, a forensics team had gone over every inch of the boat. They found no indication that anyone had attempted to hijack it, no signs of a struggle, and no evidence that a crime had been committed. Alex’s car, which was found parked in the Heartstone Marina, was equally pristine. That left two possibilities, and the media jumped at the chance to let their audience ponder the options.

The New York Post was the cruelest of them all. When the search and rescue mission was finally called off, the headline in Saturday’s paper read:

dunn gone. accident or suicide?

My father had no question which one it was. As far as he was concerned, Alex took the coward’s way out. Finn McCormick was a throwback to the days when men were men, and they did what they had to do to feed, clothe, shelter, and protect their families. He had no idea that Alex was living with a wife who’d been given months to live. But even if he had, he’d have decided that would give a real man even more of a reason to stick around.

Lizzie, who lived in a world of medical realities, was much more pragmatic. She dealt with Alex’s death the same way she dealt with my diagnosis. We’re born. We die. Life goes on.

Katie, like her aunt, accepted her father’s death, but Kevin held out hope. Like a child who envisions his divorced parents magically reuniting on Christmas morning, he clung to the dream that somehow his father had miraculously been rescued by a passing boat, was suffering from temporary amnesia, but would one day remember who he was and come walking through the front door ready to pick up where he left off and go skeet shooting with his son.

It was Kevin’s way of coping, and I did nothing to quash his fantasy. But after years of working in the criminal justice system I knew with absolute certainty that in today’s world it is impossible for someone to completely disappear.

The police ran an ongoing check of Alex’s financials, and his picture was distributed to multiple agencies. But from the moment of his disappearance no money was touched, no credit line was tapped, no surveillance cameras picked up his image. Even if the social media theorists were right, and he had faked his own death, I knew that he couldn’t totally escape detection. No one can. We all leave electronic footprints. But Alex left none. He was gone.

No matter how hard Kevin refused to accept it, I knew for certain that Daddy wasn’t coming home.