"I'm going to take photographs of it later today. In good light. With a ruler. I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry. Take them."
At the hospital, they let him up to the fourth floor at 4:25 a.m. Corinne met him at the elevator and did not say anything at all, only put her arms around him very carefully on his right side, where it didn't hurt, and held on. Then she took his good hand and led him into Room 4C, where his daughter was asleep and his son-in-law was asleep in the chair beside her, and in the clear plastic bassinet at the foot of the bed lay Lena Corinne Ashby-Grant, four hours and thirty-three minutes old, wrapped in a striped hospital blanket, frowning at a dream.
He could not pick her up. His left arm was strapped down and his right wrist was bruised purple where the cuff had been. So he bent over the bassinet, slowly, his ribs complaining, until his good cheek was very close to hers, and he breathed in the smell of her, and he whispered something nobody else heard.
Later, Corinne asked him what it was.
"I told her I was sorry I was late," he said. "And I told her I'd build it right."
* * *
At 6:10 that Sunday morning, sitting in a vinyl recliner by the window of Room 4C with the sky going gray over the James, Julian Ashby called Delphine Okafor, who had not gone to sleep either.
"The valet," he said.
"I know."
"His name is Teodoro Barrientos. Everyone calls him Teo. He's maybe twenty-five. He parks my car every time I come to the Marlowe. He draws buildings on his phone. He gave me my own key because my daughter was in labor and he was trying to be kind, and then he saw what happened and he ran toward it, Delphine. Everyone else stood under the canopy and filmed. He ran toward it. And that man put him on the ground."