She did not entirely know why. Later she would try to explain it to herself, and to Rosemène on the phone, and the explanations would all be true and none of them would be all of it. Part of it was that she had promised. Dermot had made her promise, the first summer, the one time she had tried. She had said, Mr. Sheehan, your son drives by this house every night, and he had turned to her with those ice-chip eyes and said, slowly, every word a stone: You. Don't. Call him. Ever. He calls. If he. Wants. And she had said, All right, and she was a woman who kept her word. Part of it was that a man who already believed she was lying about where she lived would only think she had read his name off a mailbox. And part of it, the part she would only say out loud to Rosemène, months later, was this: that she had been somebody's for thirty-three years. She had been somebody's aide, somebody's girl, somebody's Haitian lady, the one from the agency, the one the daughter found. She had been introduced her whole working life by the name of the person she cared for, and she had borne it, because the work was holy in its way. But standing on Ridge Road at twelve-forty in the morning in a spotlight, she found that she wanted, just this once, to be allowed home on her own name. Not on Dermot Sheehan's. On hers. She wanted this man to look at Solange Augustin and decide she was telling the truth because she was telling the truth.
It was, she understood even as she wanted it, a foolish thing to want on a dark road from a man with a gun.
"Wait here for me," he said, and walked back to the car with her ID card.
She waited. The box sat on the stone wall beside her. She kept her hand on it. The cold came up out of the ground through the soles of her shoes. She could hear him in the car, the murmur of his voice, and the radio answering in a woman's flat voice, and the clatter of a keyboard. She knew what he was doing. He was running her name. She had nothing. She had never had anything. She had a parking ticket from 1997 that she had paid, and a green card that had become a citizenship certificate in 2004 in a ceremony at the federal courthouse on Cadman Plaza where a judge with a cold had sneezed in the middle of the oath and everybody in the room had laughed, all two hundred of them, in forty languages, and for one second they had all been the same.
He came back. He held the card out to her and she took it.
"You're clear," he said.
"I know," she said.
"That doesn't mean you're done." He looked at the box. "Ma'am, I'm going to be honest with you, because I think you're smart enough to see it anyway. There've been burglaries up here. Three of them. Sunday nights, all of them, big houses, people asleep. They're coming in on foot, and we think they're coming in on that train. They take jewelry. Cash. Watches." He let that word sit. "The last one, a lady got hurt. Bad. And she says one of the people in her house was a woman. Not young. With an accent."
"An accent," Solange said.