"Who said it to you?"
"My father."
She nodded as if this were a perfectly reasonable answer, as if it explained everything, and he supposed that to a twelve-year-old who had spent a year reading a dead man's list, maybe it did.
Her phone buzzed in the pocket of her sweatshirt. She took it out — an old phone in a cracked rubber case, the kind a parent hands down — and looked at it and typed something with her thumbs. "My mom," she said. "She's parking. She was supposed to come at eleven-thirty. I told her I'd be done by then. She worked last night. She's a respiratory therapist at Fallon General, on nights. She's going to be tired."
"I'll go," Lloyd said, and began to get up.
"No," said Lucia. "Stay. She should meet you."
He was not sure that was true. He stayed anyway.
Lorena Mercado came across the square from the Holloway corner at a walk that kept trying to become a run. She was a small woman in navy scrubs under a long brown cardigan, with her hair up in a clip and her hospital ID still hanging from a lanyard around her neck, and she had her daughter's dark steady eyes set in a face that was gray with tiredness, and Lloyd watched those eyes find the bench and find the police officer sitting on it next to her daughter and go wide. She broke into the run then, the last thirty feet, and she said "Lu? Lu, what's going on, what happened—" and Lucia stood up and said "Nothing happened, Mama, it's okay, I'm okay," and her mother put both hands on her daughter's face and looked at her as if checking for damage, and only then turned to Lloyd.
He had stood up too, without meaning to, the way you stand up for a judge.
"Ma'am," he said.
She read his name tag. He watched her read it. He watched her read it twice, and he watched her face do something he had seen faces do at doors, at hospital desks, at the edges of yellow tape — a kind of closing, a portcullis coming down.
"You're him," she said.