"I heard. You think I don't know what that is? You think no one ever put a hand on me?" He rubbed his face. "But last year, the man with the knife screaming in the lot, who came? Dale. In four minutes. I have a lease. I have a loan with my house on it. They don't pay for coffee because I want them here. If this goes on the internet with my sign in it—"
"It's not about your store."
"Everything on this lot is about my store." He said it without anger, like a figure on a statement. "You have nursing school. You don't need this. He has a lawyer probably. Delete it."
She didn't argue. She also didn't delete it. At home, in the apartment over the dentist's office on Main, she backed up the recording to her cloud account, her laptop, and a thumb drive she pushed into a sock at the back of her drawer, which felt melodramatic even as she did it. Then she sat with her thumb over the share button for a long time.
Her friend Dasia said post it. "Tag the department. Tag the news. It'll have a million views by Friday."
"It's not mine."
"You recorded it. It's literally yours."
"It's his worst night," Leila said. "It's his face in those cuffs. I don't get to make him famous for it. I'm going to wait for him to ask."
He called the next Tuesday. She took it in the back by the walk-in cooler. He told her he had filed a complaint and that a Lieutenant Yost had been assigned. He told her a lawyer from his church had advised him to ask whether she would give her recording to the investigator. "You can say no," he said. "I meant that."
"Everybody says I should post it."
A long pause. "I've thought about that more than I'd like to admit," he said. "If it goes out, it'll be about the cuffs, not the plate. People will watch me in those cuffs a million times. I'd rather it went to the people whose job it is to look once, carefully." Another pause. "If they don't look carefully, I may change my mind. I want to be honest about that."
"Okay," she said. "I'll give it to her."
When she told her uncle, he didn't shout. He folded his apron and went and stood by the air pump in the dark for twenty minutes. When he came back he said, "You'll do what you do. You're your mother's daughter," which from Samir was not entirely a compliment and not entirely not.
Dale Rusk did not come in for coffee that week, or the next.
On the second Saturday, a man walked out with a case of beer and raised his fist at Leila when she came around the counter. She called 911. It took twenty-two minutes for a cruiser to arrive. There had been a wreck on Route 9 that night; she heard it on the news later. It might have been nothing. When the young officer finally walked in, Samir looked at the clock and said nothing at all, and that was worse than anything he could have said.