She turned her head and looked up at him. Her eyes were very dark and very steady. There were fine lines at the corners of them that came from squinting or from laughing; he could not tell which.
"Say what better?"
"The apology. I'd like to make it properly." He held the coffee in both hands. "I had no business doing that. You're here for my son. You've been good to my son. And I walked over here like you were—like I was on a call."
"You were on a call," she said. "You've been on a call since you parked that truck."
He did not know how she knew which vehicle was his. Then he thought: she was here before me. She watched me sit in it.
"Maybe," he said.
"Sit down, Sergeant."
He sat down. Not beside her; one chair away, with an empty chrome-armed chair between them. The cup of coffee was too hot to hold and too full to set on the floor, and he held it anyway.
"I'll take your apology," she said. "I'm going to take it because I'm going to be in that room in an hour talking about your son, and I don't want to walk in there carrying anything I don't need. That's the first thing I tell my men. You walk into a room where somebody's dying, you leave what you're carrying in the hallway, because they've got enough to carry. So I'll take it, and I'll leave it out here." She folded her hands on top of the manila envelope. "But I want you to understand me. I'm not taking it because I think you understand what you did."
"I understand what I did."