"Is that what you want? To get off easy?"
He looked at her. It was a long look. "No, ma'am," he said. "I think what I want is to stop looking."
She did not answer that. She did not know the answer, and she was not sure it was hers to give. She looked at the card in her hand and thought about her father at the kitchen table in 2003 not saying anything for two days, and about Mr. Chilton at the counter that morning, and about the young man in the sweatshirt who had stayed, and she did not know what she would do with the card. She knew only that she would decide, and that it would be her decision, and nobody else's, and that she was in no hurry.
"I have to go get my son," she said.
"Yeah." He stepped back. "Yeah, go. I'm sorry. I made you late."
"You did."
"Tell him— " He stopped. "No. Don't tell him anything. Sorry."
She got into the car. She did not look at him as she did it, and she did not look at him as she pulled the door closed with the heavy, solid sound that German doors made, that her father had loved, the sound of a bank vault. She put the key in. She turned it to the second position. The orange light came on.
In the side mirror she could see him walking back to his patrol car with the slow, knee-sore walk, and getting in, and closing the door. He did not start it. He sat behind the wheel with his hands on it and the laptop glowing beside him, and he did not move, and she did not know if he was going to sit there for a minute or an hour, or what he would say when he got to the district, or whether the lieutenant whose name was Hecht would listen to him, or what she would do when he finished. She did not know if he would come on Saturday. She did not know whether she wanted him to.
The light went out. She started the car and pulled out onto Gravois, and the white SUV stayed where it was, getting smaller in the mirror, until a bus came between them.