She almost said no. She almost said what she always said, I'm fine, I've got it, I'm a grown woman with four stripes on her sleeve. Then she thought about the length of the drive, and the dark stretch of the county road past the rail yards, and the fact that she was still shaking and had not yet let herself notice.
"Yes," she said. "I'd like that very much."
He followed her all the way home, his headlights steady in her mirror, and waited at the curb until she had pulled into her father's old garage and the porch light had come on and gone off again. Then he flashed his lights once and drove away.
* * *
She did not sleep.
She took a shower so hot it turned her skin pink and stood under it until the water ran lukewarm, and then she put on her father's old flannel robe, which she had never given away either, and made a cup of chamomile tea that she did not drink. She photographed her arm in the bathroom mirror, where four oval bruises were already rising in a row above her elbow, darkening by the minute, and she photographed her wrists. She wrote the date and time on a sticky note and held it in the frame. Then she sat down at the kitchen table with a legal pad and wrote out everything she remembered, from the moment the shuttle doors opened to the moment Hector's headlights left her street, in the flat, numbered, unadjectived style of an aircraft mishap narrative.
At 0003 local, approximately, I exited the employee shuttle at Lot E, third shelter.
At approximately 0006, I attempted to start the vehicle. The starter solenoid did not engage.
At approximately 0008, while I was bent over the engine compartment holding a hammer and a phone flashlight, an officer grabbed my left upper arm from behind without warning or verbal command and turned me. His first words were: "Drop it. Drop the hammer. Whose car is this?"
She stopped there and looked at that line for a long time.
Then she got up, went out through the kitchen door into the garage, turned on the bare overhead bulb, and opened the passenger door of the Skylark. She opened the glove box.
Her father had been a careful man, careful in the way that people are careful when carelessness has cost them something. The glove box of the Skylark was as orderly as a surgical tray. There was a flashlight, a tire gauge, a pen, a small spiral notebook in which he had recorded every tank of gas he had ever put into the car along with the mileage, and a long brown envelope, soft and furred at the edges from decades of handling, held closed with a rubber band so old it had gone stiff and shiny.
On the front of the envelope, in her father's square capitals, in faded blue ballpoint, it said: IF THEY ASK.