They put him in a curtained bay in the VCU Medical Center emergency department at 11:31 p.m., with his right wrist cuffed to the rail of the gurney and a uniformed officer sitting on a plastic chair outside the curtain. It was not Dacey. It was a young officer named Pham who had been called in from the Third Precinct, who had very clearly been told nothing, and who kept looking at Julian's tuxedo and then at his own shoes.
An X-ray showed a grade-three separation of the left acromioclavicular joint, where the collarbone meets the shoulder blade. The ligaments had torn. There was also a hairline fracture of the left zygomatic arch, the bone under the cheek, which explained why the side of his face had gone soft and numb and why, when he tried to smile at the nurse who brought him ice, the smile came out crooked.
"How'd this happen?" the resident asked, holding the film up to the light box.
"I was put onto the hood of a car," Julian said.
The resident looked at the cuff on his wrist and at the officer outside the curtain and did not ask anything else. But he wrote it down, and Julian watched him write it down, and later Delphine would get those notes too: Pt reports he was "put onto the hood of a car" by police. Injury pattern consistent with high-energy anterior impact, L face and L shoulder, with posterior compression.
At 11:52 p.m., four floors above him, in Labor and Delivery Room 4C, Naomi Ashby-Grant gave birth to a seven-pound, one-ounce girl with a full head of black hair and a voice, the midwife said, like a church bell. Corinne Ashby held her daughter's hand through the last of it and kept looking at the door.
She found out where her husband was at 12:20 a.m., when Delphine Okafor, who had heard about the side lot from three different people at the gala within ten minutes and had spent the next hour calling every precinct in the city, finally reached her. Corinne kissed her daughter, kissed her granddaughter, and took the elevator down four floors in her socks.
Officer Pham would not let her past the curtain at first. Corinne was sixty years old. She had taught eighth-grade civics at Henderson Middle School for thirty-one years, and she had in that time faced down fourteen hundred thirteen-year-olds, a dozen principals, and a school board, and she looked at Officer Pham now with a face that every one of those children would have recognized.
"Young man," she said, "my husband is in that bed because one of your colleagues slammed him into his own car. Our granddaughter was born half an hour ago. He has not seen her. He is going to see her. Now you can stand there with your hand on your belt while I hold my phone up to that curtain, or you can step aside and let me do it properly. I would prefer properly."
Pham stepped aside.
So it was through the screen of his wife's phone, on a video call from the fourth floor, with his right wrist cuffed to a gurney rail and his left arm strapped against his chest and half his face swollen shut, that Julian Ashby first saw his granddaughter. Naomi held her up to the camera, exhausted, crying, laughing. The baby squinted at the light.