She looked up at him then, for the first time since she had begun to open the box, and in the backwash of the flashlight he could see her face clearly. A broad, tired, intelligent face, the face of a woman who had been explaining things to people for a long time. There was rain on her eyelashes. She did not look angry. That was the worst of it. He had been braced for anger, he realized; some part of him had wanted it, the way you want a fever to break.
"Because you asked me where home was," Solange Augustin said. "And I told you. And you said, try again."
He did not have anything to say to that.
"I wanted you to believe me," she said. "Me. Not because I said his name. Not because I said your name. I have been on a lot of roads, Officer Sheehan. In this country and in the other one. I have been asked a lot of times where I am going. I thought, just this once, at the end of the day, on my own street—" She stopped. She shook her head a little. "It was foolish. I know it was foolish. I am too old to want things like that from a policeman at one in the morning."
"It's not your street," he said, and heard himself say it, and wished, instantly, that he had bitten his tongue in half instead.
She did not flinch. She only looked at him for a long moment, the way Mrs. Lacombe used to look over the tops of her glasses.
"I sleep in your room," she said.
It went into him like the cold had gone into her coat, in two places, like hands.
"At the top of the stairs on the left," she said. "With the slanted ceiling. Your mother measured you on the closet door every June. I see it every morning when I get my uniform. You were five foot eleven in 1995. I have slept in that room for four years. I have scrubbed the kitchen floor where your father dropped this. I have cut his toenails and I have held the basin when he was sick and I have sat with him at three o'clock in the morning when his heart was bad and he thought it was the end, and he told me the name of every crossing between Brewster and Grand Central, in order, so he would not be afraid. I know which stair creaks. I know the porch light switch is backwards. I know that he cannot sleep until he hears the late train come through Bedford Road, and that tonight he heard it at twelve-twenty-one, and that he has been sitting in that chair for half an hour listening for me to come up the porch steps." Her voice did not rise. It never once rose. "Do not tell me what is my street."