"No," she said. "You shouldn't have."
"Is he okay?"
That mattered to her. She noticed that it mattered, and she put it away to think about later. "He says he's okay."
Gerrit nodded at the floor. Then he picked up his phone from the bench next to him and held it out to her without looking at her, and she took it, and looked at the photo from Jaxtyn, the blue Corolla, the two blurred shapes, the broken light. Her own car. Her own Sunday night. It was strange to see it from the outside, the way it was strange to hear your own voice on a recording.
"I wasn't going to do anything," he said. "I swear to God, Noor. I was going to ask you. I was going to wait and ask you. And then I saw him walking across the lot and I just." He made a small motion with his hands, a pushing motion, and then looked at his hands as if they belonged to somebody else. "It was like watching it happen. You know? Like I was in the stands."
She did know. That was the thing. She had read that sentence, almost word for word, in two of the case studies she had highlighted at eleven at night.
She sat down on the overturned bucket by the workbench, across from him, close enough to touch but not touching. The garage smelled like cut grass and motor oil and the rubber of his old cleats in the bin by the door. She had been in this garage a hundred times. She had watched him bench in here, and shot a basketball at the hoop over the door with him and Merrin, and once, sophomore year, kissed him for the first time in here on a hot night in August with the radio playing something terrible. It felt like a different room now.
"Gerrit," she said. "I need to ask you something, and I need you to just answer it. Don't figure out what I want to hear. Just answer."