Ione came on Saturday morning, dropped off by Lisa in the lot at ten with a duffel bag and a backpack and a stuffed manatee named Burrito under one arm, and she ran up the walk ahead of her mother and into the lobby, and Kurt, waiting just inside the front door, watched her go straight past the package room without a glance and felt something in his chest unclench and clench again. She talked all morning, about a girl in her class who had a pet tarantula and about how the cafeteria at her school served breakfast free to everyone now, even if your parents had money, which she thought was very fair. He listened. He made her pancakes in the shape of a lowercase i because that was the only letter he could do. In the afternoon she wanted to go to the playground at Wright Park, and he took her, and she climbed to the very top of the dome-shaped rope thing and shouted down at him to watch, Dad, watch, and he watched, and when she slipped on the way down and caught herself, he had already crossed half the distance from the bench without knowing he had moved, his hands out.
"I'm fine," she said, annoyed, hanging there. "Dad. I've got it."
"I know you do."
He put his hands in his pockets and went back to the bench and sat down and kept them there.
On Monday evening, a little after seven, somebody knocked on the door of 1D.
He knew who it was before he opened it. He had been half expecting it for four days and dreading it for four days, and he opened the door and Isaac Lowry was standing in the hallway in a gray sweatshirt and jeans, without the work shirt, and it was strange how much that changed him, how much younger he looked without his name over his heart. He did not come in. Kurt did not ask him to.
"I filed," Isaac said. "With the accountability office. Friday morning. I wanted you to hear it from me."
"Okay." Kurt nodded. "That's right. You should have."
"I know I should have. I didn't come down here to ask you if I should have." Isaac looked at him steadily. "I thought about not doing it. I want you to know that too. Mrs. Dunning told me not to. She said it would make Del a story in this building forever and she didn't want that for her. My pastor told me to pray on it. My sister in Spokane told me to get a lawyer and sue the city and the building and you personally for every dime. I thought about all of it. Then Del came out of the bathroom Friday morning in a T-shirt, getting ready for school, and I saw her arms."
Kurt said nothing.