"I'm going to have to write this up," Rodney said. "Any time I get dispatched, I write something. It'll say I responded to a call about a suspicious person and made contact with the mother of a student, verified her identity, and the call was unfounded. It'll have your name in it. Your new name. That's all it'll have."
"The other one," she said.
"I never ran the other one. I don't have to write down a name I never ran." He looked at her. "I don't remember what it was, to be honest with you. I'm fifty-one. I forget my partner's name."
He saw her almost smile, and decide against it, and he did not blame her.
"Can I ask you something?" she said.
"Sure."
"The paper didn't change. The cards didn't change. Nothing I showed you changed. A minute before she came out, you were going to—" She stopped. "What changed?"
He thought about how to answer that. He thought about telling her about Hickory Street, the whole thing, the Pontiac and the Spider-Man pajamas and the trailer outside Fort Smith, and decided that she had enough strangers' stories in her life and did not need his.
"Long time ago," he said, "I watched a little boy go with a man who had a perfect ID. Real license, real name, right face, no warrants. Boy even called him Daddy. And the whole way down the walk to the car, that boy was looking back over his shoulder at the girl in the doorway. I didn't know what that meant, then." He looked down at Juno, who was not looking at him. "She didn't look back at anybody. She came straight at me."
Brooke put her hand on top of her daughter's head.