It was, Winston thought, exactly the right response.
He thought about Thorndale Avenue. He thought about the tailgate warm from the afternoon sun, and his hands flat on it, and Amara walking across the crosswalk with her backpack and her elephant keychain, thanking the crossing guard the way she always did, and stopping at the back of the truck, and looking at the officer, and saying in the completely clear, completely organized, completely unafraid voice of a nine-year-old who knows what a situation requires: "Could you please let my daddy go so we can go home?" That was the statement. That was all it needed to be.
He made dinner. He made the pasta with the lemon sauce that Amara had been requesting for two weeks, using the recipe that his mother, Eleanor, had taught him when he was at university, and that had become the dinner he made when he needed to make something that required attention and produced something good. The attention required was calibrating the reduction; the sauce could break if you rushed it. He had learned not to rush it. He stood at the stove and watched the reduction and thought about nothing in particular, which was the closest he came to rest on most days. Renata set the table.
Eleanor Beaumont stayed for dinner because she always stayed on Fridays, and because she and Amara had a tradition of solving one hard problem from the practice book over dessert, and because Winston's cooking was better than her own and she had never pretended otherwise. They ate. They talked about ordinary things: Eleanor's retirement lecture series, a project Renata had presented to the city planning commission that morning, Amara's mathematics competition that was coming in November.
They did not talk about Thorndale Avenue because it was Friday, and because it had been documented, and because what needed to happen next was already in motion, and because the kitchen with the pasta and the lemon sauce and the four of them at the table was the thing that mattered on a Friday evening.
They solved one problem over dessert. The problem involved the area of irregular polygons, and Amara solved it in four minutes by decomposing the polygon into triangles and applying the formula sequentially, which was a method she had learned from Priya and had found more elegant than the coordinate grid method her teacher had demonstrated.
Eleanor said, "I would have taken seven."
Amara said, "You might have found a different method."
Eleanor said, "I would have found the same method, just more slowly." She said it with the specific pleasure of a person who is watching something they built continue to build itself past what they built.