"Does he," she said.
"Does who what?"
"Does the guy always get home."
"In books he does."
She nodded slowly, as if he had confirmed something. Then she put a strip of paper into the book to mark her place — a bookmark from the Fallon Public Library with a cartoon owl on it — and closed it. She did not close it gently. She closed it with both hands, hard, so that the covers came together with a flat crack that made Arnold's pigeons go up again across the square, and she set it on her knees and laid her palm on top of it.
"Okay," she said. "I'll talk to you now."
"Good." Lloyd took out his notebook. "Let's start with a phone number for your mother."
"In a minute." She unzipped the small front pocket of the backpack. "I have something I'm supposed to give you."
"Supposed to give me."
"Not supposed to. That's the wrong word." She frowned at herself, as if wrong words were a personal failing. "Something I decided to give you. I've had it for a long time. I was going to give it to you later, after I finished. But it's okay. It can be now."
She took out a plastic sleeve, the clear kind with three holes punched along one side for a binder. There was a single sheet of paper in it, folded into thirds and then flattened out again, and the creases had gone soft and white with handling. The paper was yellow. Not yellow. Goldenrod. He knew the color before he knew he knew it, the way you know your own front door from the end of a block.
She slid the sheet out of the sleeve and held it out to him. Her hand was perfectly steady.