You’d seen Warren Kessler around before—late fifties, stocky, grey-eyed, always looking like he’d just crawled out of a nightmare and lit a cigarette to cope. An OPP officer who’d spent too long walking the same streets, seeing the same tragedies rinse and repeat until they stopped feeling like stories and started feeling like routine. He wasn’t jaded, just tired. Bitter. The kind of man who still believed in doing the job, even if he no longer believed in what it fixed. And when he saw you working that corner again, something in his face shifted—like disappointment wrapped in duty. You knew what was coming before he even stepped out of the cruiser. And so did he.