It might happen like this. Two police officers come to the door. Perhaps they will be the same ones who came last time but most likely not.
But the last time there were police at the door it was with bad news; news that a loved one was dead: suddenly, brutally, unreasonably. That's what you live with - getting your head round that, coping with the anniversaries.
Or perhaps you no longer cling to the idea that someone will pay for this. That's what they have come to inquire about, those police officers at the door: to inquire how would you feel about us opening the file again and trying once more to nail the killer?
Your first reaction might be: why ask me? But they will ask you.
The chief constable of the PSNI, Sir Hugh Orde, is setting up a Historical Enquiries Team (HET) to open files on 1,800 unsolved murders. He has £32 million to work with for the next four years. He also has a lot of forensic material still being held that can be retested with better technology than was used before. There will be DNA-testing of much of that material for the first time. Even skilled killers within the best-trained paramilitary gangs didn't worry about spit and sweat in the 1970s.
The legal discretion on whether to reopen an inquiry rests with the police. Orde is giving the veto to the families. "If a family says it has moved on and doesn't want to go through this again, no way will I put them through it."
These will not be ordinary criminal investigations. After the Good Friday agreement there will rarely be any prospect of the killer going to jail for more than two years. Many of those responsible for unsolved killings will have served long sentences for other offences already, but there are people who were armed on the streets 30 and more years ago and who killed and got away with it. Some have turned religious. Some are retired. Some are working as teachers and lawyers.
Orde's HET will find some of these people if the families of the victims give the nod to the search. He says there has to be a blanket reopening of cases, otherwise justice goes only to those who shout loudest for it. Already there are to be separate inquiries into the murders of Pat Finucane, Billy Wright, Rosemary Nelson and Robert Hamill. There has been the Bloody Sunday inquiry into the killings in Derry by the Parachute Regiment on January 31st, 1972.
But this initiative will sit strangely beside another project for closing cases. The two governments and most of the political parties in the North have agreed to a procedure by which people on the run might submit to a quick judicial absolution process and go free. Any of those who are afraid that Orde's HET might unearth their past deeds can submit their name, through the armed group they were linked to, for a trial that is likely to be over in a single day.
Anyone who now fears that a soggy cigarette butt they left at a murder scene 30 years ago might now incriminate them has to calculate whether it makes more sense to own up for a quick trial and immediate release or take their chances against the HET.
What about where the reopening of a case threatens someone who now has a high profile political career and is regarded as indispensable to the peace process? Gerry Adams was able to throw his protective mantle around the Shankill-bomb delivery boy, Seán Kelly, as he tried to do with the killers of Garda McCabe, and demand his release.
Orde says no one has immunity. He told the John Hewitt summer school in Armagh last week that if there is political interference, "I will walk and I will talk". Also at the summer school was writer Gillian Slovo. Her mother was killed by a letter bomb in South Africa and the case featured in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
"I was very surprised to hear Mr Orde say that families of victims would have a responsibility in this," she says.
She fears those families will come under pressure to let things go for the sake of political stability and that families will be divided anyway. "Is it a policeman's job to determine what is the authentic voice of a family?"
Orde acknowledges that his plan is imperfect. This is not about fulfilling the normal requirements of justice, however, that killers should be caught, tried and jailed. It is about the need for a truth and reconciliation process. For want of others moving to provide that, he can give at least some of the families half of what they need - the truth about who killed one of their own. And it is because this is primarily an initiative for those families that they are entitled to a veto on it.
"It's at his discretion," says lawyer Arlene Foster. "And he has resources to think about, so he's naturally going to concentrate on those cases that are complaint driven."
There are two policemen at the door. They are offering to open old wounds. That man you saw in the supermarket, the one they say killed your brother: they'll pull him in - if that's what you want; if that's what you really want.
Malachi O'Doherty is a journalist, broadcaster and author. John Waters is on leave