At ten past four, when his shift ended, Alvin walked her to her car.
He did not have to. The escort, technically, ended at the property line, and the property line was the revolving door. But he came through the revolving door behind her carrying one of her three file boxes, and Kiran came behind him carrying the other two stacked, with the photograph of Zofia in its bubble wrap balanced on top, and they rode the escalator up to the skybridge and crossed it over Trumbull Street in the long gold light. On the fourth level of the Church Street garage, in one of the wide spaces she had planned on at a quarter to six that morning, they loaded the boxes into the back of her Subaru, and Kiran hugged her, quickly and awkwardly, and said, "Call me. I mean it. I'll need you for the thirty days. They don't know where half the wiring goes," and went back toward the skybridge tapping two fingers on his sternum.
Alvin stood by her driver's door. He had his overcoat on over the blazer now, an old tan raincoat with the belt hanging loose, and he looked smaller in it, the way men in uniforms do when the uniform is covered up.
"You're not signing it," he said. It was half a question.
"I don't know," she said honestly. "Paragraph fourteen says I can talk to the Fire Marshal and anybody else with a badge and a seal. It doesn't say I can talk to you. Or to a lawyer you hire. Or to a jury." She looked at the blue folder on the passenger seat through the window. "I've got twenty-one days. I've got a scan in December. I've got a kid who needs cleats. I don't know."
"That's an honest answer."
"It's the only kind I've got left today."
He nodded. He put his hand into the breast pocket of his blazer, under the raincoat, and she thought he was going to give her back the card, and was surprised by how much she did not want him to. It was his. It had always been his. But it was the printout he took out, the small square of paper folded eight times, soft as cloth, and he held it out to her.
"Florine's going to want to see this," he said. "I'm not going to tell her about it tonight. I don't know how. I'm going to tell her about the doors tonight, and about the fire lieutenant, and she's going to want to know why I did it, and I'm going to have to tell her something. And then Sunday after church she's going to want to sit at the kitchen table and read every line of that paper herself, because she reads everything herself, she reads the side of the cereal box. And somebody's going to have to sit there and tell her what the columns mean." He held it out a little farther. "It's not going to be me. I can't read it to her. I can't do it again."