13-Year-Old Mystery Solved as Shocking Arrest Rocks Community

13-Year-Old Mystery Solved as Shocking Arrest Rocks Community

who was sitting on her couch with a laptop balanced on her knees. That is the last image anyone has of Kaitlin Markham. Not running, not frightened, just a young woman on a summer evening working on her schoolwork. Her dog somewhere nearby, her fiance in the room. He barely moved from that spot all evening.

 And sometime after midnight, she was gone. To understand how a person vanishes from a life that was so nearly complete, you have to go back. Back to the town, back to the girl. Back to the relationship that the people who loved her were only beginning to understand. Fairfield Ohio announces itself quietly. Humid August air that sits on your skin.

Cricket sounds after dark. Neighborhoods where the houses look the same from the street and the differences are all on the inside. The kind of place people call safe. The kind of place where nothing extraordinary is supposed to happen. Kaitlin Helen Markham was born here on August 16th, 1990. And from her very first hours, she was loved without condition.

 Her father Dave had chosen adoption. When the call came, he drove to that hospital and held his daughter for the first time when she was just 20 minutes old. He sat with her against his chest and, by his own account, simply could not stop staring at her. The world inside that hospital room was complete. Outside, it was already shifting in ways no one could see yet.

 She grew up alongside her younger sister Ollie, four years her junior. Their parents separated during childhood, but both remained present. Both remained devoted. The two sisters grew close. The bond that forms between siblings who share the same roots but see the world from different angles. What strikes you, collecting the accounts of people who knew Kaitlin, is that everyone reaches for the same words and then seems to realize those words aren’t enough.

 She made people feel seen. She laughed at her own jokes before she finished telling them. It was, in the most genuine sense, someone you wanted to be around. But here is the detail that tells you something true about who she was. She had paint in her hair almost constantly, not as a statement, simply because she forgot it was there, because she had been so absorbed in whatever she was creating that by the time she looked up, it was already too late.

 Her sketchbook sat on every table she ever occupied. Her camera went everywhere. If a particular quality of light caught her eye, she needed to capture it before it disappeared. Her high school art teacher said it plainly, this was not a student who was good at art class. This was someone who thought in images.

 She enrolled at the Art Institute of Ohio in Cincinnati, graphic design, commercial arts, and she flourished. By the summer of 2011, her sketchbooks were fuller than they had ever been. Her camera roll was overflowing. She had a part-time job at David’s Bridal, a townhouse on Dorshire Drive, a dog she adored. Everything she had worked toward was almost within reach.

 John Carter had been part of her life since she was around 16. They met through the same circle of friends, the insular social world that forms in small suburbs. John was a year older, also from Fairfield. He worked with fire and molten glass, shaping things under intense heat, an art that demanded precision, control, and a very particular kind of patience.

People who knew them in the early years described them as well-suited, two eccentric teenagers who seemed to balance each other. By the spring of 2011, they had been together 6 years. He proposed. The ring was a family heirloom. Dave gave his blessing, as long as his daughter was happy, as long as she was taken care of.

 Then there was the plan, Colorado, after graduation, a fresh start somewhere new. John talked about it constantly. Caitlyn talked about it, too. But if you listened carefully, and some people were starting to, there was a difference in how she said it, a flatness, a hesitation that she hadn’t learned yet to hide, because behind the door of that townhouse, things were not what they appeared to be.

 By June of 2011, Caitlyn had been confiding in a close friend, carefully, quietly, about what the relationship had actually become. The controlling behavior, the jealousy that turned sharp whenever she even spoke to another man, the pressure she had grown exhausted by. She told this friend plainly she no longer loved him, that she felt trapped, that she had grown far beyond the girl who had walked into this relationship at 16.

 Then came the credit card incident, 3 weeks before she disappeared. Kaitlin went to the GE Credit Union with John’s mother to apply for a card, a routine errand. But at the counter, John’s mother made a joke. She’d co-sign, she said, but only if Kaitlin promised to take John with her to Colorado.

 The manager laughed, turned to Kaitlin expecting the same. Kaitlin did not laugh. The manager remembered her expression as somber, serious in a way that felt wrong for the lightness of the moment, like someone standing at a counter going through a motion, thinking very clearly about a decision she had not yet said out loud.

 The application was never completed. On the evening of August 13th, 2011, a mutual friend came over to the Dorshire Drive townhouse. The three of them spent the evening together. The friend would later tell investigators that Kaitlin barely moved from the couch the entire time. Laptop on her knees, schoolwork open, deadlines approaching.

 She was quieter than usual, distant in a way he couldn’t quite name. She didn’t make her usual jokes. Didn’t fill the room the way she normally did. He left around 10:45. He said goodbye, stepped outside, and left her there with John. It was the last time he ever saw her. Somewhere between the last text she sent at 11:36 that night and the moment her phone went dark just after midnight, in that small, quiet window, something happened in that townhouse that would take 13 years to bring into the light.

Hi, my name is John Carter. I am calling. I know that you’re not supposed to report a missing person before 24 hours, but my fiance is missing. I can’t find her anywhere. Listen to that call carefully, not for what he says, for how he says it. The pacing is controlled. The details arrive in the right order, almost rehearsed in their neatness.

 When the dispatcher asks if the two of them had argued the night before, the answer comes back instantly. Not at all, no pause, no search through memory. The kind of clean, immediate response that doesn’t belong to someone reaching back to the fog of worry and exhaustion, but to someone who already knew that question was coming.

 The hesitation only appears when it shouldn’t, on simple, factual questions, things he should know without thinking. And then, almost as an aside, before anyone had asked him to look anywhere, he mentioned the Sacred Heart Festival happening just up the street. Lots of strangers in the area, he said, questionable people.

 He was pointing elsewhere before the search had even begun. Officers arrived at the Dorschner Drive townhouse and found nothing that looked like a crime scene. No forced entry, no signs of struggle, no broken glass, no overturned furniture, nothing displaced or broken. Caitlyn’s purse was on her bed, her keys beside it, her wallet, ID, and cash untouched.

 Her clothes in the closet, her shoes by the door. The only things missing were Caitlyn and her phone. Her dog was wandering the yard alone. For anyone who knew her, that landed differently than the rest. She would not have left him like that. Would not have walked out the door without him accounted for. It was the clearest signal, quiet, small, and devastating, that something had gone badly wrong.

Fairfield police followed up on the festival suggestion. They spoke to vendors, workers, and everyone who had been in the area that night. It led precisely nowhere. Every person they looked at, they cleared. The Sacred Heart Festival had nothing to do with anything, which brought them back, as it always would, to the last person who had been alone with her.

 The community response was enormous and immediate. Volunteers came by the hundreds. Wooded areas, parks, waterways, old train tracks, searched and searched again. Dave Markham was at the center of it, channeling the unbearable energy of a parent who cannot stop moving because stopping means accepting something he was not prepared to accept.

 A mounted search team came in from Texas. The reward fund grew. The story went national. John Carter was there, too. In front of cameras, in the search parties, in every available interview, he called Kaitlin the love of his life, said he was terrified, said all he wanted was to take her to Red Lobster for her birthday, like she had planned.

 He was, by every visible measure, a man in agony. But investigators were watching, and the picture they were assembling did not entirely match the performance they were seeing. Within the first 48 hours, John was brought in for formal questioning. Investigators used a voice stress analyzer, not evidence, not a verdict, but a map, a way of knowing which roads lead somewhere and which ones don’t.

 It gave them a very clear map. When asked whether he knew anything about Kaitlin’s disappearance, deception indicated. When asked whether he was involved, deception indicated again. Not once, consistently across every question that touched the night of August 13th, and then the investigators noticed his neck. Running along the side of it were angry, jagged welts, deep red scratches that curved in a way no electric razor produces, regardless of how unsteady the hand holding it.

 When asked, John said it was from shaving. Then, when pressed in a later conversation, he said he actually wasn’t sure how he gotten them, couldn’t recall. A friend confirmed he hadn’t seen any scratches on John’s neck on the night of August 13th. He first noticed them the following day, the day Kaitlin was reported missing.

 Something else was quietly accumulating. A friend of Kaitlin’s told investigators that in those first days after the disappearance, when she spent time with John, she noticed something she couldn’t dismiss. He kept referring to Kaitlin in the past tense, not once, repeatedly. Naturally, the way language slips when the truth beneath it is already settled, even when the performance above it insists otherwise.

 She had been missing less than 48 hours. Dave Markham had felt it even earlier from the very first phone call when John screamed into the receiver that Caitlyn was missing. And what Dave noticed in that first moment was the shape of what wasn’t there. John never asked, “Have you seen her? Did she call you? Is she with you?” He never asked. He announced.

 From the moment he screamed in my ear, Dave would later say, “I didn’t believe him.” When phone records came back, they turned suspicion into something harder. Texts had passed between Caitlyn and John from 11 that night until 11:36. Then, silence. At 12 minutes past midnight, both phones went dark, not one before the other, not with any gap between them.

 Simultaneously, the same moment. Two phones, two people, one instant of coordinated silence. When investigators asked John about the texts from that evening, he said he had deleted them by accident. Then, in a second conversation, the story shifted. He had deleted them to free up space, he said, because he was receiving so many messages from concerned friends the following day. It was 2011.

 Smartphones did not work that way. The excuse collapsed under the weight of its own logic. And Caitlyn’s phone, which might have told its own story, was never found. Not then, not ever. The town kept searching, the cameras kept rolling. John Carter kept showing up, kept speaking, kept performing the role of the desperate fiance in a case that publicly had no suspects and no answers.

But the voice stress map had its roads marked. The scratches had been photographed. Two phones had gone silent at the same moment. And a father who had held his daughter at 20 minutes old already knew, in the way that grief sometimes knows before the evidence catches up, exactly what had happened. The case, for now, had nowhere left to go, so it did what cold cases do.

 It waited. The news cycle moves fast. Within weeks of Kaitlin’s disappearance, the cameras that had filled Fairfield’s streets began appearing less frequently. The national coverage thinned. Other stories came along. They always do, and the weight of attention that had briefly pressed down on this case began to lift.

The reward fund kept growing. The flyers stayed up, but the world, in its relentless forward motion, had largely moved on. Dave Markham had not moved anywhere. He was still there, in the search parties, at the community meetings, in front of anyone who would listen. He had helped establish a new chapter of Texas EquuSearch, the volunteer organization that had sent teams into Fairfield’s fields and forests.

Where others searched for Kaitlin, Dave now helped search for other people’s daughters, too, channeling the unbearable energy of a father with nowhere left to put it. He drove roads he had already driven. He looked into ditches he had already looked into. He could not stop, because stopping felt like abandonment, and abandonment was something he was constitutionally incapable of.

 Meanwhile, John Carter continued appearing on camera. He gave interviews. He participated in vigils. He stood beside Dave at community events and spoke about Kaitlin in careful, measured sentences. There were no tears, something that people around him began to notice and quietly file away. A lawyer who had known the family since 2011, Tina Barrett, would later say it plainly.

 She had watched John Carter for years, and in all that time, through all the public appearances and all the appeals and all the searching, she never once saw him cry. Not until he was afraid. In September of 2011, 1 month after Kaitlin vanished, John Carter sat down for a formal polygraph examination. He did not pass.

 Polygraph results are not admissible in court. They are not proof of guilt or innocence. But they gave investigators something, a shape, a direction, a sense of where the inconsistencies lived. And in John’s case, the inconsistencies lived in every question that touched the night of August the 13th. The examiner noted deception, investigators noted it, too.

But noting something and proving something are separated by a distance that, in this case, would take years to cross. By mid-2012, a new lead briefly surfaced. A man named Gurpreet Kang had been indicted on a sexual battery charge for an assault on a woman in Oxford, Ohio. And because he lived and worked just blocks from Katelyn’s townhouse near a gas station at the end of her street, investigators looked at him seriously.

The community latched onto it with the desperate energy of people who needed an answer. Fairfield police investigated thoroughly, and then they cleared him completely. Dave Markham would later describe running into Kang at that same gas station sometime after the investigation had closed. Kang saw him across the counter, recognized him, and his shoulders dropped.

 He looked at Dave and said simply, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” Dave said it broke his heart. Because it should never have been him. As more people came forward to speak with investigators in the months after Katelyn’s disappearance, a portrait of the relationship began to emerge that contradicted almost everything John had said publicly.

 Friends described a Katelyn who had been quietly unhappy for months, worn down by John’s controlling behavior, his drug use, the pressure he applied in private that he never showed in public. One friend said Katelyn had told her plainly in June of 2011 that she no longer loved him, that she felt trapped, that Colorado, which John spoke about constantly and enthusiastically, was his plan, not hers.

 She had been doing the planning, putting away the money, making the arrangements. He had been spending. She had been preparing to leave a relationship. He had been preparing to relocate it. The distance between those two realities, investigators were beginning to understand, was where this case lived. But, distance is not evidence, and evidence was what they did not have.

Spring arrived in 2013, then April. On April 7th, a couple was making their way along the creek banks off Big Cedar Road in Cedar Grove, Indiana, about 30 mi east of Fairfield, across the state line. They were searching for scrap metal, familiar with the land, comfortable in the kind of rural quiet that most people never encounter, when they came across what appeared to be a pile of discarded debris wrapped in black plastic sheeting.

 They might have walked past it. They didn’t. Inside the sheeting, partially exposed, was a jawbone. They called 911. Franklin County Sheriff’s deputies and Indiana State Police responded and cordoned the area. What they found, spread across that dump site, not buried, not concealed with any particular care, but layered under trash as though discarded, were the skeletal remains of a young woman.

 Dental records confirmed it within days. The remains belonged to Kaitlin Markel. He had been missing for 20 months. The forensic examination that followed was careful and methodical, and in several ways, deeply disturbing. The bones showed no signs of having been buried at this location. The body had been dumped here, investigators believed, possibly moved from somewhere else entirely.

The skull had been found separately inside a tied plastic bag. The medical examiner determined that the head had not decomposed inside that bag. It had been placed there after significant decomposition had already occurred elsewhere, meaning someone had returned to wherever Kaitlin’s remains had first been left and moved them.

 On the bones of her left wrist, forensic anthropologists identified three to four sharp force wounds, a precise V-shaped incision that had shaved the surface of the bone, not consistent with any accident, not consistent with any natural process. The coroner ruled the death a homicide. The cause of death could not be determined.

 When a local reporter reached out to John Carter for comment after the discovery, his response came by text message. He wrote that he had only been in front of cameras before because he wanted to find Kaylyn. Now that was done, he said. He had no interest in putting himself on camera anymore. He just wanted to mourn his loss and try to put his life back together.

 No rage at whoever had done this. No demand for answers. No mention of justice for the woman he had called the love of his life. Just a desire to move on. Dave Markham read that and felt something harden in him. He had felt it in his gut since the first phone call. That scream, that announcement, that absence of the questions a worried person naturally asks.

 He had watched John stand beside him at vigils and searches and memorials, knowing what he now believed with complete certainty. He was not going to let this case sit. In 2015, Dave lobbied the Butler County Sheriff’s Office directly, pushed for the investigation to be transferred away from the Fairfield Police Department, which had run out of runway, and into new hands that might find new angles.

The Butler County Sheriff agreed. Fresh investigators came in. 10 boxes of case files were opened and re-examined from the beginning. A neighbor of Kaylyn’s had also come forward. On the night of August 13th, she said, she had heard voices from the townhouse. Muffled, confrontational, and beneath it one word repeated, “No.

” Again and again. Digital forensics told another part of the story. John Carter’s phone showed 15 consecutive hours of complete inactivity beginning in the early morning of August 14th, the exact window during which investigators calculated a body would have needed to be transported 30 miles across a state line and deposited along Big Cedar Road.

15 hours of silence from the phone of a man who publicly claimed to have spent that entire day desperately trying to reach his missing fiance. In January of 2021, John Carter sat down for his third polygraph examination. On the standard scale, zero indicates no deception. Negative three is considered significant.

 John Carter scored negative 25. The examiner said it was not even close, that the chart didn’t behave this way for people telling the truth. The specific questions that produced the most extreme responses were those that asked whether John had disposed of Kaitlin’s body at Big Cedar Road. When investigators raised these results with Karen Winkler and asked why her son kept failing these examinations, she told them that Jeffrey Dahmer had passed his polygraph.

 She said it as a defense, as though it settled something. The investigator replied quietly that he wasn’t talking about Jeffrey Dahmer. He was talking about her son. And he said something else directly to John in one of their final interviews that landed in the room and stayed there. I’ve interviewed a thousand people. Homicides, assaults, trespasses.

 I’ve never in my career interviewed a psychopath. The day you walked out of that room, I turned to my colleague and I said, “That was the first one.” On March 22nd, 2023, body camera footage captured the moment John Carter was taken into custody at his place of work. He stepped outside and the officers were waiting.

 And what the camera caught in that first unguarded second before the performance could reassemble itself was the face of a man who had spent 12 years certain this moment would never arrive. Not shock, not indignation. Something closer to the particular collapse of someone watching the structure they built, brick by careful brick, finally give way.

 He was charged with two counts of murder. He said there was no physical evidence. The officer acknowledged there wasn’t much direct physical evidence. But there was, the officer said, “a considerable amount of everything else.” John asked for a lawyer. There is one more account offered later, second hand, the kind of testimony courts handle carefully because it passed through another person before it arrived.

 An inmate who had spoken with John while he awaited trial said that John had described in private what happened in that townhouse on the night of August 13th, 2011. An argument, Caitlyn on the ground, his hands, the silence that followed, and then not panic, not accident, but a decision to make it look like something she had done to herself.

Whether that account is true in every detail, only John Carter knows. But it aligned with uncomfortable precision with the wound on her wrist, the words on his door, and 12 years of a man who never once in public asked who had done this to the woman he claimed to love. After his arrest, John Carter posted a $1 million bond and walked out of jail. He went home.

 He wore a GPS monitor on his ankle. He continued for over a year to live his life, the same life he had been living for 12 years while Caitlyn’s family prepared for a trial that everyone who had waited this long had decided they were ready for. More than 50 people were subpoenaed by the prosecution. Evidence was organized.

Witnesses were prepared. June 2024 was circled on every calendar that mattered. Three weeks before the trial was scheduled to begin, John Carter’s defense team contacted the prosecutor’s office. They were offering a deal. Later, when asked who had made the first move, the prosecutor confirmed it plainly.

 The defense came to them, not the other way around. And those who had been watching John Carter since 2011, who had studied the architecture of his behavior across 13 years, understood immediately what that meant. A lawyer named Tina Barrett, who had stood beside Dave Markham through most of this, said it without hesitation.

 He would not have walked into that courtroom and offered a plea unless he believed he was going to receive probation. He had spent 13 years avoiding accountability. He intended to spend the next phase of his life doing the same. On a Friday in June 2024, John Carter stood in a Butler County courtroom and entered a guilty plea to a single count of involuntary manslaughter, an unintentional killing committed during the course of a misdemeanor assault, not murder, not the deliberate calculated act that the notebooks and the poetry and the wrist

wounds and the 12 years of orchestrated silence all pointed toward a misdemeanor assault gone wrong. That was the legal frame. That was what 13 years of a missing woman, a father who never stopped, a community that searched fields in the dark, and a shed full of matching plastic sheeting had been reduced to.

Dave Markham was sitting in that courtroom when the plea was entered. He said later that he was shaking, that he was so angry he could barely sit still, that John Carter had 13 years, 13 years to say it was an accident, to say anything, to give Caitlyn’s family the one thing they had asked for more than justice, more than a conviction, an explanation.

 Instead, he waited until 3 weeks before a jury would have heard everything, and then he made a deal designed to minimize his exposure. He got 6 more weeks of freedom while he waited for sentencing. 6 more weeks after 13 years. It doesn’t seem right, Dave said. Because it isn’t. The sentencing hearing arrived in the summer of 2024.

 John Carter stood before Judge Dean Hoyt and said nothing. His attorneys had argued for probation, no prison time at all, for the man whose shed had contained the plastic sheeting that matched the wrapping around Caitlyn’s remains, whose door had carried the words about her wrists, whose polygraph score had registered at -25. Probation.

 As though the appropriate response to all of it was supervision and a check-in schedule. Judge Hoyt rejected it. He said that anything short of the maximum sentence would demean the seriousness of what John Carter had done and the impact it had carried. He sentenced John Carter to 36 months in state prison, the maximum permitted under Ohio law for a third-degree felony involuntary manslaughter conviction.

 36 months, 3 years for a woman who had been gone for 13. Dave delivered a victim impact statement. He stood in that courtroom and asked the judge to let John Carter feel even a fraction of the pain that Caitlyn’s family had carried since August of 2011. Michelle Feist, who had been Caitlyn’s closest friend, spoke too.

 She said it was good in some way to finally know the truth. But then she paused. “Really, what is the truth?” she said. “We still don’t even know exactly what happened and he’s still in some way denying it.” Because that was the other thing. John Carter stood in that courtroom and said nothing, not a word of explanation. Not a sentence directed at the people in those seats who had spent 13 years waiting.

 When given the opportunity to speak, to account, even minimally, for what he had done, he chose silence. The same silence he had maintained since the night Caitlyn’s phone went dark. He did cry leaving court. Tears, finally, the first anyone had seen from him in 13 years of vigils and searches and memorials and media appearances. Tina Barrett watched him and said what she had been thinking for years, “John Carter cries when he is afraid.

” In 2011, when he was spinning his story, he was neither afraid nor sad. He is now. What happened in the hallway outside that courtroom defied expectation even for people who had long since stopped being surprised by John Carter. His new attorney, Carl Lewis, stood before reporters and made a statement.

 He said, “On behalf of his client and his client’s family, that John Carter, notwithstanding the guilty plea, had nothing to offer the Markham family about what had actually happened to Caitlyn.” And then he said that John Carter was asking the Markham family to go out and find the real person responsible, the real person, after a guilty plea, after the shed, after the notebooks, after -25 on a polygraph scale that ends at -3, after 13 years.

Find the real person. Dave Markham was standing a few feet away when those words were spoken. Karen Winkler, John’s mother, was also in the hallway. She looked in the direction of the man whose daughter had been wrapped in plastic from her shed, and she said that she had adored Kaitlin, that she had always known they had a good relationship.

 Dave listened to all of it. That was the most bizarre thing I have heard, he said afterward. Those were lies. That was delusional. Some months later, John Carter applied for early release, having served roughly half of his 3-year sentence, having been noted as a model inmate. The request came before the court. Judge Hoyt denied it.

 John Carter would serve his full sentence. There are charges that were never filed and can never be filed now. Ohio’s statute of limitations on tampering with evidence and desecration of a corpse is 6 years. Kaitlin’s remains were not found until nearly 2 years after she disappeared, and the clock had been running since the night she went missing.

 By the time investigators had enough to act, those charges had already expired. The man who moved her body, who placed her head in a separate bag, who drove 30 miles across a state line in the dark with his headlights off, that conduct will never be prosecuted. There is also the question of the second person, the redacted name in the search warrant affidavit, the individual who investigators believe helped dispose of Kaitlin’s remains.

 That person has never been charged. The full truth of what happened in the hours after midnight on August 13th, 2011, may never be fully known. John Carter has not offered it. He has not tried. He’s offered no explanation, Dave said. Hasn’t even tried. To me, that just shows his character. And even if he wrote a confession in prison, he would have to be more convincing than he has been for the last 13 years.

 Near Caitlyn’s home, there is a park. In the park, there is a tree. People call it Caitlyn’s butterfly tree. In the days before sentencing, Dave and Tina Barrett gathered supporters there. Not to protest, not to rage, but to focus. To write letters to Judge Hoyt. To channel 13 years of grief and fury into something constructive, something Caitlyn herself who spent her life making things, creating things, turning feeling into form, might have recognized.

 Butterflies, because that is what she loved. Because Dave has said that in the worst of the early years, when the weight of not knowing was almost unbearable, a butterfly would sometimes come and circle him. And he would think, “There she is. She was bright and vibrant and coming out of her shell.” He said once. Like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly, she was just getting started.

 Dave Markham and Tina Barrett are now working to pass what they call Caitlyn’s Law, legislation that would extend the statute of limitations in cases where a missing person investigation becomes a homicide investigation. The clock, the law would say, should start when the homicide is confirmed, not when the person disappears.

 So that the next family cannot be robbed of charges the way this family was. So that the next killer cannot simply wait and hide and let time do the work for him. It would be, as Dave put it, so like Caitlyn, still helping people even now, still making something out of what was broken. She would have been an extraordinary woman.

 Her father knows it. Her sister knows it. The art teacher who recognized her gift before she did knows it. Everyone who ever sat beside her and felt, inexplicably, like the most seen person in the room, they all know it. She had paint in her hair and a sketchbook on every table and a future she had earned.

 And it was taken from her by someone who slept in the same house as the evidence for 12 years and called it nothing. Three years for all of that. The butterfly tree is still there. Dave still visits it. And somewhere in whatever form love takes when it outlasts the person it belongs to, so is she.