To Serve and Protect

The guy in the next box is a jackass

This really is a romantic story. If the guy who posted the comment immediately below mine ever reads my stories, he'll choke on the flashback elements. I admit to not liking a few things about capitalization and punctuation, but you and Pat are filling in the character details as you go along, and if anyone questions that, they watch even less TV than I do. It's hardly realistic to show characters that don't have lives and memories that color their own actions. I did wonder what Linda's children could have heard that would turn them against their mother so badly (the worst thing you could say about her, besides having female lovers, was that she was married to law enforcement -- and I seriously doubt if her ex knew about the female lovers). Still, Mr. Anonymous can go bite himself and check into a hospital to see if they have some new kind of antivenom.