"Daddy," Naomi said. "Daddy, what happened to your face?"
"Nothing, baby. I'm fine. Let me see her. Let me look at her."
He looked. Behind the curtain, Officer Pham looked at his shoes.
"Her name's Lena," Naomi said. "Lena Corinne. You like it?"
"I love it," Julian said, and it was the first time all night he cried.
* * *
Teo had no one to call him on a video screen.
He was taken to the Richmond City Justice Center on Fairfield Way, a big tan building near the river that looked from the outside like an office park and from the inside like exactly what it was. He was booked at 12:14 a.m. A deputy rolled his fingers across a glass scanner one by one, then all four at once, then his thumbs, and Teo watched the green line of light sweep under his hands and thought, There it goes. He knew, because Ruth had explained it to him, that the fingerprints did not stay in Richmond. They went to the state police, and from the state police to the FBI, and from the FBI, automatically, in a matter of minutes or hours, to a database in the Department of Homeland Security that would compare them to the prints taken at his asylum biometrics appointment and to the prints taken at the border, in a tent near McAllen, three years ago, when he was so thin his belt had wrapped around him one and a half times.
It did not matter that the charge was a misdemeanor. It did not matter that it would almost certainly be dismissed. What mattered was the green line.
They took his belt, his shoelaces, his wallet, the hundred-dollar bill Julian Ashby had pressed into his hand, and his phone. Before they took his phone, he asked if he could send one text, and the booking deputy, a heavy older woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain, glanced at the clock and said, "One."
He sent it to Ruth Halvorsen. I got arrested. Obstruction. Richmond City jail. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.