SETH HARPER WAS spending a Sunday spring afternoon detailing his wife’s Rallye Red Honda Civic when he learned that she’d been killed by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan.

Despite the Pacific Northwest’s reputation for unrelenting rain, the sun was shining so brightly that the Army notification officers—a man and a woman in dark blue uniforms and black shoes spit-shined to a mirror gloss—had been wearing shades. Or maybe, Seth considered, as they’d approached the driveway in what appeared to be slow motion, they would’ve worn them anyway. Like armor, providing emotional distance from the poor bastard whose life they were about to blow to smithereens.

At the one survivor grief meeting he’d later attended (only to get his fretting mother off his back), he’d heard stories from other spouses who’d experienced a sudden, painful jolt of loss before their official notice. Seth hadn’t

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