It was Pete who broke the silence that followed, and he did it by lowering the phone the rest of the way, until it hung at his side with the screen dark, and looking at it as if it belonged to someone else. Pete had come along that evening, Tomas would learn later, mostly because going along was what Pete did, and he had filmed because filming was what Pete did instead of deciding, and now the decision had been taken out of his hands by the simple spectacle of a thing he had no category for: a man who could plainly have hurt his friends and had chosen, visibly and repeatedly and at some inconvenience to himself, not to. "I didn't, uh," Pete said. "Man. I stopped. I stopped filming like a while ago. I don't know if it, I mean, the start's on there. The shove and that. Your, whatever that was. I stopped when the, when Ricky went over. It didn't seem." He stopped too.
"You can keep it or delete it," Tomas said. "That's your business. If anybody asks you what happened, though, I'd be grateful if the story had an ending as well as a beginning."
"Yeah," Pete said. "Yeah, okay."
Then Tomas did something he had been putting off, because putting it off had kept the evening in a category he understood. He took his own phone out of his back pocket, and he checked the time, and he thought, with a clarity that went through him colder than anything Kyle's hands had managed, about the ordinary evening that had been scheduled in place of this one. It was twenty past seven. Across town, in the house on Elm Street with the yellow door that Rosa Herrera had refused for thirty years to repaint on the grounds that a door should look lived in or not bother being a door, his daughter Sofia was, at that moment, supposed to be negotiating the terms of a bath she did not wish to take, prior to a story she fully intended to prolong, prior to a sleep she would fight with the doomed and magnificent stamina of a seven-year-old who had never once conceded that the day had beaten her. She was safe. She was four miles and a whole world away from this gravel, in a warm kitchen with her grandmother, and had been since Tomas dropped her off at half past five with her backpack and her library book and instructions, issued to Rosa in front of her so that they had the force of public law, that she was not to have the second biscuit before her tea. He had arranged his whole life, shift by shift and year by year, in concentric careful rings around the central fact of her safety, and the innermost ring was the plainest: she was never anywhere near the parts of the world where men settled things with their hands. Never near his old world at all. She knew her father fixed buses. She knew he had strong hands and a funny scar and that he could not be beaten at thumb wars.
She did not know this. Standing on the path with his shirt torn at the button and four men on the ground around him breathing like bellows, Tomas felt the two halves of his life look at each other across eight quiet years, and he found that his hands, now that they had nothing to hold, had begun, very slightly, to shake.
"Phones away," he said, to no one in particular, to steady himself. "Everybody just breathe. The park's closing in a bit anyway."
The ranger's torch found them before the ranger did, a hard white circle that came swinging down the path from the direction of the bandstand, growing and steadied by a hand that plainly knew paths and dark, and Dana Cole arrived inside her light a moment later, with her radio already talking quietly to itself on her shoulder and her other hand resting, without drama, on the belt where her equipment lived. Dana was forty-four, broad and unhurried, with grey coming through her hair in a way she had never once attempted to negotiate with, and she had been the ranger at Riverside for eleven years, which meant she had separated drunks, retrieved children from the riverbank, talked a man down off the footbridge in the small hours, and developed a complete and weathered philosophy about trouble. Trouble, in Dana's philosophy, announced itself loudly and early, and the scene in front of her did not fit it at all, because the scene in front of her was quiet, and had the particular stillness of a thing that had already finished and was waiting to be tidied.