"Read the papers," I said.
I said it to Derek. I hadn't planned the words. I had planned many speeches over the previous five weeks, lying awake, and every one of them had been too long, and what came out of my mouth instead was three words, in my ordinary voice, the voice I use on the phone with vendors. It was very quiet on the fifth floor all of a sudden.
Derek didn't move. He looked down at the papers and didn't touch them. And it was Talia, in the end, who reached for them. She reached for them the way you'd reach for a thing someone has dropped, to be helpful, and peeled the top sheet carefully off the frosting, and saw the seal of the State of Ohio at the top, and the words OHIO STATE HIGHWAY PATROL, and the date, and her own name typed in the box marked UNIT 1 — DRIVER. And her face went still.
"What is this?" she said. Not to me. To him. "Derek. Is this my report?"
"Tal," he said.
She turned the pages. Nobody in that room was breathing. The diagram. The supplemental narrative. My statement in the sergeant's square hand. And then the last page, the lined witness form, with its handwriting slanting hard to the right, and its signature, and she stopped there, because she knew that handwriting.
She read it aloud. I don't think she meant to. I think she was the kind of person who reads things under her breath when they're hard, and the room was so quiet that her breath was enough.