15-month-old Kadence Fox clutches two dolls bearing her father's image and kisses a wall plastered with his picture.
Kadence couldn't possibly understand how her dad, Officer Bradley Fox, died a year ago.
But there's no question she knows that he lived.
"I vowed to Brad on Day 1 that they would never not know who he was, and I would do everything in my power, every single day to remind them," said Lynsay Fox.
For Lynsay, left to raise Kadence and Brad Junior, the son her husband never knew, the last year has been a practice in staying afloat, often just trying to rise above the tears that come and go without warning.
She knows it's in those low moments that her husband can still console her.
"The smiles on my kids' faces, on days that I just don't know how I'm functioning, I know that's him telling them to be good for mommy," she said.
Lynsay says she relives the horror of the day her husband died every day, as she did in our conversation.
She remembers in vivid detail and emotion the call to Brad's best friend, a fellow Plymouth Township officer, after she heard of the shooting, pleading with him for information.
"He said, 'Yes.' Little did I know he was already at the station getting dressed to come get me."
And the moment she first saw Brad's lifeless body.
"I held his hand, I looked at him. I look at the nurse and said when's he waking up?"
Indeed, she says the reality of his loss still has not hit, a sentiment echoed by Brad's mom.
"You just always have it in the back of your head that one day he's just going to walk through the door," she said. "You hope."
In recent weeks, the Fox family has won what they call a courtroom victory: the lengthy 20- to 66-year prison sentence for Michael Henry, who illegally sold the gun to the man who shot and killed Officer Fox.
But now Henry is pleading for a reduced sentence, calling himself a victim of the "circus" around the case.
"He has the chance to visit with his children, or his children have the chance to visit him and see him again," said Lynsay. "My kids go to a gravestone."
And those kids give her more than enough to live for, and to love.
"I have two kids that I have to push for and through every day to give them the best life I can, a happy life," she said. "So I can't not be strong."
