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* * *
He spotted her sitting alone on the ground next to her husband's grave.
It was nearly 1 a.m. in mid-December, bitterly cold, and she wasn't wearing a coat.
Officer Derek Purcell radioed to dispatch that he was going to be busy at Kellogg and 119th Street West — Resthaven Cemetery — and then parked his car.
He tried to lift her spirits with a joke.
"Excuse me, ma'am, this place closes at 9," he said in a formal tone.
But Sarah Etheridge didn't blink. She had called Derek from the cemetery, wanting to talk.
When he got there, Sarah had nothing to say.
She just sat there, consumed with grief over the shooting death three months earlier of her husband, Sedgwick County sheriff's Deputy Brian Etheridge. She had tried to hold it together for Natalie, their 2-year-old daughter, for relatives, in- laws and friends.
It all seemed like too much.
Derek squatted next to her. They stayed that way for perhaps 20 minutes — her sitting on the ground in silence, him resting on his haunches.
"I just don't think I can do it anymore," she finally said.
On one of the darkest nights of her life, Sarah had reached out to a friend who shared something with her husband: He also had been shot and gravely wounded — except Derek had survived.
He was within seconds of bleeding to death by the time he reached Via Christi Hospital on St. Francis on July 11, 2008, his femoral artery shredded by a bullet fired by a man who committed suicide before officers could arrest him.
Sarah found comfort in talking to someone who could understand her loss, her pain.
* * *
The new year brought changes.
Sarah was settling into an apartment in Derby with Natalie and getting together with the Tuesday night regulars again.
Derek would often be there. He had become part of the group.
He was getting ready for Mass when she called one Sunday, so he invited her to join him. She did, and began going to church every week after that.
Sarah had been raised Catholic, but fell away from it after high school. She noticed something, however, when she went to Mass with friends after Brian died.
"Mass was the only place I truly felt at peace," she said. "Something like this can either destroy your faith or make it stronger. In my case, it made it stronger."
Calls or text messages with Derek were becoming common. More than once, she texted him when he was on a date.
After one of those dates, he called her on the way home. She was restless and not in the mood for sleep. So he picked her up and they drove around, talking for hours.
At one point, they stopped at a park and walked to a bench. She talked about how much her life had changed. She was a single mother. After Brian, she would never find anyone else. Her life would be raising Natalie, and that would be it.
"You're just seeing what's right now," Derek told her. "You can't see past what's happened, and you can't see more than a week out."
That's what he was like in the weeks after he was shot, he told her.
When Derek joined a softball team the following month, Sarah began coming to see him play. That delighted him, and he began looking for opportunities to see her more often.
"It turned from enjoying being around her to being excited being around her," he said.
But he was concerned about his growing feelings for her.
"I didn't want to overstep my bounds," he said. "I didn't want to affect the friendship that we had. We were really good friends. We could talk about anything."
Sarah was concerned, too.
When friends asked Sarah whether she was interested in Derek, she would say no.
Yet she looked forward to his phone calls or text messages. After spending a day with Derek, she would realize, "I didn't cry today."
"It caught me by surprise," she said. "Neither one of us were looking for anybody, and yet I found myself having feelings ... feelings that I never thought I would feel again."
She found herself wishing she had met him a year or two later, not now when she was such a mess emotionally.
"I realized I liked him, and I was mad at myself for feeling that way," she said. "I always like to have a plan, and for the first time in my life, I felt like I couldn't control my feelings. And I was pretty upset with myself."
It came to a head during a group gathering in March, when Sarah steered clear of Derek and brushed off his attempts at conversation.
"Why is she so mad?" he asked himself. "What is going on?"
He followed her home, and she told him in the driveway she didn't want him to come inside. As he began to drive off, she snapped, "Where are you going?"
Baffled, Derek said, "Do you want to talk?"
"Yes. No."
He convinced her to go with him to get something to eat, but she wasn't hungry and didn't touch her plate.
It was close to 1 a.m. by the time they returned to her place. Sitting in his car, he asked, "Why won't you talk to me? What's the problem?"
"I don't know how to say it," she replied. "I don't know what to do."
"Do you think there's something more between us than just friends?" he asked.
"Yes, I do."
"I do, too."
* * *
After all their inward struggling, the transition to being a couple was easy.
Their first social event together came in May, when Derek's sister got married. They didn't announce they were a couple, said Monica Purcell, Derek's mother, but their closeness at the wedding was noticed.
"All my other kids went, 'Wait a minute — what's going on here?' " she said.
The therapist Sarah was seeing as part of her recovery from Brian's shooting also questioned her choice to date another law enforcement officer.
"Are you sure you want to go down this road again with somebody in that profession?" she asked. "You have to think about that."
When she did, Sarah said, "The first thing that came to my mind was, 'If Brian had been OK, if he had survived that, he would have gone back to work.' So, it's really no different.
"You have to be aware... you can't be naive and completely in denial about... what could happen. But you can't become obsessed with it."
Early on, Derek said, he was concerned about history repeating itself.
"With Sarah and Natalie, the thought is there: 'This has happened to them once. I don't want to do it to them again,' " he said.
"You could worry yourself sick that it's going to happen, and every time you look somebody in the face wonder if they're going to shoot you... but all it's going to do is make you die really young."
Close friends and family members — among them Brian's parents — greeted news that they were dating with delight.
But some friends of Brian, including classmates from the law enforcement academy, were not happy.
She was moving too fast, they said. She wasn't being respectful to Brian.
The criticism stung, but they stayed together.
"We know what our intentions were from the start, and they were nothing but good," Sarah said. "God knows why we're together, and nothing else really matters."
* * *
One day in late July, Derek went to the mall to buy a hat — and drifted into a jewelry store. He found a diamond he liked and put it on layaway.
He had no idea when he would propose — perhaps at Christmas — but as the days passed he suddenly couldn't wait. He paid for the stone and had it placed in a setting he had chosen.
On Aug. 9, he asked Sarah's father permission to marry her. Then he stopped by Sarah's apartment in Derby.
When Sarah went into the kitchen, he asked Natalie to come with him to her bedroom, where they often played together.
"I need you to give your Mom something," he told her.
"No."
"Please?"
"OK."
Natalie carried the tiny box to the kitchen and said, "Here Mom, Derek told me to give it to you."
"What is it?"
"I don't know."
Sarah thought it was a set of earrings — until she opened the box.
She stifled a gasp and followed Natalie to her bedroom. Derek was down on one knee.
"Will you marry me?"
"Are you serious?"
Yes, he assured her, he was.
They hugged and started to call family members with the news. Brian's mother was thrilled and immediately asked when they were getting married.
Sometime the following summer, Sarah guessed. Why wait that long, her former mother-in-law asked.
Derek and Sarah set the wedding date for Feb. 26.
During church-mandated marriage preparation sessions with the Rev. Matt McGinnis, they asked him whether their upcoming nuptials were a bad idea, given everything that had happened.
McGinnis, a longtime friend of the Purcell family who had been vocations director for Derek while he was in the seminary, told them no — he could see God's hand at work in bringing them together.
"They're both godly people," McGinnis said. "They're both people of prayer. They both have good discernment skills.
"Their duty to God is uppermost in their minds."
Derek's family had no doubts, either.
"They're so good together," Monica Purcell said. "They just... click."
The wedding at St. Thomas Aquinas Church wasn't just a ceremony uniting two people brought together by an unusual set of circumstances, Derek said. It was a "thank you" to everyone who had saved his life and helped him recover.
His best man was Brad Crouch, whose quick thinking and decisive actions on the night Derek was shot were pivotal to his survival. The guest list included the police officers and firefighters who responded the night Derek was shot.
After the wedding, when Derek moved into their new house in west Wichita, he noticed Sarah had hung several photos along the hallway leading to the bedrooms.
She had hung photos of Brian at one end of the hall, near Natalie's room. Photos of her, Natalie and Derek were in another group at the opposite end.
Derek moved most of the photos around, mingling them together.
"You can't take your life with Brian and your life with me and separate them," he told her. "It's part of our story."
Natalie had only two concerns after Derek proposed to her mother: Could she come to the wedding? And could she wear a pink dress?
She began calling Derek "daddy" shortly before the wedding. She likes to tell people she's special because she has two fathers, not one.
She says "Hi, Dad!" whenever they drive past Resthaven Cemetery.
As a wedding gift to Natalie, Derek gave her a silver locket. Inside are two small photos: one of her with Derek, the other of her with Brian.
"I'm not trying to take Brian away from Natalie," he said. "I'm trying to be the dad that he would have been if he was here now."
A few weeks after he was shot in 2008, Derek sat in his parents' living room and reflected on everything that had come together in order for him to survive what should have been a fatal wound.
God had saved him for a reason, he said. He just wasn't sure what it was.
Now he knows.
"I've actually told Sarah she's the reason I got shot," Derek said.
"We never know God's plan, but if I could replay the voice of God, it would be like, 'All right, Derek, I got this girl and we've got some bad things about to happen to her. But in order to make things work, you're going to have to take a couple for the team. So go on out there and get it done.'
"I would not have been able to relate to her in the way I'm able to relate to her had I not been through what I have, had I not almost died... I would never be able to relate to her in any shape or form."
Just as she did with Brian, Sarah likes to call Derek every now and then when he's on duty to make sure he's safe.
On the first Saturday in April, Derek, Sarah and Natalie attended the dedication of the Law Enforcement Memorial of Sedgwick County.
Seeing so many people in uniform crowded around her, people she hadn't seen since Brian was killed, took her back to those dark days in 2009.
"It just reminds me of how I felt," she said. "You're crying and your throat hurts and you can't think straight."
After the ceremony ended, Derek, Sarah and Natalie walked to Brian's plaque. Natalie slipped off her shoes and tried placing her feet inside her daddy's shoes, which are cast in bronze.
As he watched his wife and Natalie, a thought came to Derek.
"He's in my spot" on the memorial, Derek said. "He took my spot, and now I've taken his spot."
Something that remarkable, they say, could only be the handiwork of God. And that's why they feel a sense of security moving forward.
"If we really do believe that God brought us together, then he's got to have something (planned) for us," Sarah said. "I believe that we're together because we're supposed to be."
One clue to what lies ahead became clearer last week: the sound of a beating heart during a sonogram.
Sarah is due around New Year's Eve.
