Why? Victoria had not been asked this question directly before. She had thought about it. The version she would give if asked. But thinking about an answer and speaking it were different.
Because I was afraid, she said. Roy looked at her. He had not expected that. Afraid of what? Marcus said from beside her.
She took a moment. Afraid that if I was connected to it, to the fire, to the rescue, to all of it, it would become the central thing about me. And I didn't want to be the woman who walked into a burning building. I wanted to be the woman who showed up for whoever needed her next. She paused because the fire was one night, the next person who needed help was going to be tomorrow.
And I didn't want to be standing in the middle of a story about 4 years ago when someone needed me in the present. The people close enough to hear were quiet. Roy Baines looked at her for a long time. Then he said, "The woman who walked into the building so she could get out and walk into the next one." "Yes," she said.
He nodded slowly. "My wife said something like that once," he said. About the best kind of people. She said they don't stop to take credit because stopping costs time they don't want to spend when there's more work to do. Victoria looked at him. "
She sounds right. She usually is, Roy said. She's going to want to meet you. Victoria said that would be all right. James Cole moved through the crowd with Ethan and Victoria watched them.
The uncle and nephew, the man whose fractured ankle she had carried the last 40 ft, and the young man who had been about to have his life taken from him by a lie, moving among people who knew their names and were glad to see them there. She watched Ethan receive the kind of presence that community provides when it shows up without being asked to. She watched him struggle with it slightly. The particular discomfort of a young man who has been taught to manage his own weight and is being offered help from every direction. She watched him learn in real time that accepting this was not weakness.
Marcus moved back to stand beside him. He's going to be all right, Victoria said. Yes, Marcus agreed. He is. What happens with Pullman?
She said. Marcus was quiet for a moment. The DA's office got a call this afternoon before the session ended. Someone I trust tells me there's already an investigator assigned. Cho will talk, Victoria said.
When faced with his own criminal exposure, he'll talk. That's what I think too, Marcus said. And Pullman, Marcus looked at her. Men like Pullman count on the gap between what people know and what can be proved. Today, you close that gap considerably.
He paused. It won't happen tomorrow. These things take time and patience and a willingness to stay in the fight through the slow parts. I know, she said. Are you willing?
She looked at him. I told Dennis I'd be there for whatever comes next. I heard Marcus said I'm asking something different. She waited. Are you willing to stop disappearing it?
He said after tonight, after this crowd goes home and the day becomes a story people tell, are you willing to let people know where you are? Victoria was quiet. The question landed differently than she expected. Not as an imposition, not as a demand or a recruitment pitch. It landed as something simpler and therefore more significant.
It landed as, "Are you willing to be findable? Are you willing to let the people whose lives you have intersected know that you are still in the world?" She thought about the nine years of the jacket, the $40 purchase, and the woman outside the diner in West Texas who had thrown in a cup of coffee and looked at her like she already knew where the jacket was going. She thought about the name inside the collar given not chosen belonging to her anyway, in the specific way things belong to you when they have been witnessed. She thought about her mother working late in a small office on cases that couldn't be won through evidence alone and what it meant to love justice without sentimentality.
She thought about Rose Cole, who was 6 years old and had opinions about everything and didn't know yet that her father came home from a burning building because a woman decided that direction was still worth moving in. "I'm willing to stop disappearing," she said. Marcus nodded. He said nothing more because nothing more was needed. The late afternoon shifted toward evening and the crowd did not rush.
People spoke with each other. Some of them found Victoria and introduced themselves with the particular directness of people who are not interested in being indirect about the fact that they have something they want to say. She listened to all of them. She did not perform humility. She was not the performing type, but she received what they brought with the same full attention she brought to every difficult situation.
Because these were people and people in her experience were always worth the full attention. At some point, Dennis Marsh appeared at her elbow with two paper cups of coffee from the truck at the corner. He handed her one without ceremony. She took it. The journalist from inside, Dennis said.
He wants a statement. Tell him I don't have one. He'll write the story anyway. I know, she said. The story is going to be what the story is.
I'd rather not put words in it that I'll spend time regretting. Dennis drank his coffee. He's going to write about the jacket. He saw it. He's going to write that the judge tried to make you take it off.
He was in the room. She said he's allowed to write what he saw. Dennis looked at her. You're not concerned about how it makes Whitmore look. Whitmore made a mistake.
Victoria said he knows he made a mistake. He said so directly and without qualification. What a journalist writes about that is between the journalist and his editor. Dennis was quiet for a moment. You have a very particular way of operating.