Sarah looked around. A sign on the wall read LEVEL FOUR. Beneath it was the garage operator’s name and a street address.
She read both.
Hank turned.
She met his eyes and kept talking.
The officer asked whether she needed an ambulance, whether the man with her had threatened her, whether either of the men had touched her.
Sarah answered each question.
When Nguyen asked Hank’s name, she gave it.
Hank nodded once.
“We’ll send someone to you,” Nguyen said. “Stay where you are if it’s safe. If it stops being safe, call emergency services immediately.”
Sarah agreed.
After she hung up, Hank returned.
“Good,” he said again.
She had expected an argument and was almost angry not to get one.
“You’re going to have to answer questions.”
“I know.”
“Maybe they’ll arrest you.”
“Maybe.”
“You sound like that doesn’t matter.”
“It matters. Just less than whether you get home.”
She pulled his jacket tighter around herself.
For the first time, she noticed his left hand shaking.
Not much.
Enough.
“You aren’t calm,” she said.
“No.”
“You’re pretending.”
“I’m trying to be useful.”
A gray station wagon appeared on the ramp nine minutes later.
Hank moved so Sarah was behind the column again, but a woman lowered the driver’s window before he reached for his phone.
“Hank. It’s me.”
She parked two spaces away.
The woman who got out was in her sixties, with cropped silver hair, a long green coat, and the exhausted, assessing expression of a nurse at the end of a difficult shift.
She looked at Sarah first.
“Are you hurt?”
“Everyone keeps asking me that.”
“Because it’s the first question.”
“What’s the second?”
“Whether you want to sit down.”
“No.”
“All right.”
Ruth did not step closer.
Sarah appreciated it despite herself.
“Where’s my mother?”
“With a friend. She’s safe.”
“Who are you?”
“Ruth Calder. I knew your parents.”
“You all did, apparently.”
“Yes.”
“Were you going to tell me that before or after somebody shot at me?”
Hank looked away.
Ruth kept her gaze steady.
“You deserved to know long before today.”
“Then why didn’t I?”
“Some of that answer belongs to your mother. Some belongs to me.”
“And the rest?”
“To people who made us afraid.”
A police vehicle rounded the ramp behind her station wagon.
Ruth glanced toward it, then back to Sarah.
“You called?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Sarah almost laughed.
Apparently this was the one decision everybody had agreed she was qualified to make.
The responding officer was a broad man named Ellis, with rain on his shoulders and a notebook already open. He spoke to Sarah first, then separated Hank and Ruth without making a show of it.
Sarah told him what she remembered.
The mirror. The jacket. Her father’s name. The motorcycle.
Saying it aloud made the story sound less believable.
Ellis did not tell her that.
He asked questions and wrote down the answers.
When she described the pale mark below the man’s eye, he asked which eye.
“Left.”
“His left?”
She thought about the mirror.
Then the alley.
“Yes. His left.”
He nodded and made a correction.
At some point, she began to shiver so hard her teeth knocked together.
Ruth opened the passenger door of the station wagon.
“This is an offer,” she said. “Heater’s on.”
Sarah sat.
Ellis crouched beside the open door rather than standing over her.
“Do you want to go to the precinct and finish there?”
“Yes.”
“All right.”
She looked past him.
Hank stood beside his motorcycle with another officer who had arrived in a second car. His vest made him look harder than he had in the diner, or perhaps Sarah had simply begun noticing the weight of it.
“Is he in trouble?” she asked.
“Right now we’re figuring out what happened.”
“That sounds like something you say when you don’t want to answer.”
Ellis gave a tired half smile.
“Sometimes it is. Today it means I don’t have enough information.”
That answer she could believe.
Ruth drove behind the police car.
Hank followed on his motorcycle.
Sarah watched him in the side mirror until the garage released them into the wet gray morning.
The city looked offensively unchanged.
A woman hurried across a crosswalk holding a newspaper above her hair. Two construction workers stood beneath scaffolding eating breakfast sandwiches. A boy in a red raincoat jumped into a puddle while his father pretended to be annoyed.
Sarah turned away from the window.
Ruth said nothing for three blocks.
Then she asked, “Do you need anything from your apartment?”