(S is for superstitious, stunning, and sexy)

The four small, round clover leaves, once pliable, now stiff and dry, were pressed flat between the pages of The Hunt for Red October, Will’s favorite book. Hannah found them when she pulled the volume from the shelf and leafed through it. The clover fluttered to the living room floor and lay there between the packing boxes.
“Summer of ’02,” she said aloud, the day crisp in her memory. She felt the lake breeze on her face and the warm sun on her back as she searched the crop of clover for one with quadruple leaves. Will had laughed at her zealous mission. “So what if a clover has four leaves—nothing’s special about it.” Then he gently turned her face toward him. “What’s special is you.”
That day by the lake he said she was sexy, he called her stunning. These were words she never attached to herself, but that he said them must make them true. She did feel sexy that summer, and had her long brown hair cut in a style that accentuated her large hazel eyes.
She saved the clover she finally found, storing it on purpose in Will’s book. She wasn’t really superstitious, but you had to take luck when you found it. Perhaps the clover would keep Will safe.
And it did, on his first tour. He narrowly missed a firefight that killed two of his best friends. Traumatized by their deaths, he was transferred out of Iraq for a time, but the war dragged on and he re-upped. Hannah couldn’t talk him out of it.
“It’s like the Clancy book,” he said. “The enemy’s out there—you can’t see them, but you know they’re there. And they’ve got to be stopped.”
“You don’t have to do the stopping this time. You’ve already given two years of your life.”
Will paused in his packing. “Stan and Jared gave all of theirs.”
Hannah plunged back into her work at the preschool. When Will came back this time, they would start a family. He would enroll in manager training, and by the time their oldest was in preschool, he would be a company vice president.
By mid-fall, the mornings were chilly, and a mist rose in the hollows. With her sweater buttoned against the cold, Hannah pointed out the woolly caterpillars crawling along the preschool fence. “See their thick coats,” she said. “It’ll be a cold winter ahead.”
The school headmaster met her at the doorway, as she marched the children back inside. “Hannah.” The look on his face sent her stomach churning. “No,” she said.
The colonel waiting for her in the school office was polite and respectful, but she wanted him to cry with her. Will had been badly injured in an ambush in Falluja, and they didn’t expect him to live. He had been airlifted to a base in Cyprus, where he was undergoing surgery.
Will died the next day, on a bed thousands of miles from Hannah, with someone else holding his hand. At home, she sat in his usual easy chair. She caressed the armrests and pushed herself deep into the seat, trying to touch some elemental particle he might have left behind. All she felt was emptiness.