Under the canopy, Dara told Officer Kim exactly what had happened, in order, in short flat sentences, without adjectives. She had been fueling. The woman had demanded she move. She had said she was still fueling. The woman had come closer and continued demanding. She had told the woman to back up. The woman had grabbed the fuel nozzle with both hands while it was running and pulled on it and gasoline had spilled. She had kicked the woman once, a push kick, to the torso, to separate her from the nozzle. Then she had stopped, secured the pump, and checked on the woman.
"You kicked her," said Officer Kim, writing.
"Yes."
"With your foot."
"Yes. My left foot."
"Have you had training? Martial arts? Something like that?"
Dara hesitated. Then she told the truth. "I'm a taekwondo athlete. Fourth-degree black belt. I'm ranked third in the country. I'm supposed to compete at the national team trials in nine days."
Officer Kim stopped writing and looked up at her.
"Huh," she said. And then, after a moment, more quietly, "Well. That's going to make this more complicated."
It was Theo Navarro who made it less complicated. At least for that morning.
He had been standing between the islands the whole time, with his milk and his bread and his phone, watching the police talk to the two women, and he had been trying, for the second time that morning, to work up the courage to do something. And for the second time that morning, he had nearly not done it. He had nearly walked home. Nobody had asked him anything. Nobody had even looked at him. He was a nineteen-year-old in a black hoodie and a backward cap from the apartments on Linwood Avenue, and he knew from long experience that the best thing a nineteen-year-old in a black hoodie and a backward cap from the apartments on Linwood Avenue could do when the police showed up was walk away quietly and mind his own business.
But he kept thinking about the tall woman's face. How calm it had been. How she had knelt down in the puddle afterward. How she had put her hand on the other woman's shoulder. And he thought about the forty-one seconds of video sitting in his phone, and about the other woman in the patrol car with the foil blanket, and about what she might be telling the older cop, and about what would happen to the tall woman if nobody saw what he had seen.
He walked over to Officer Kim. He held out his phone.
"I got it," he said. His voice cracked. He cleared his throat. "The whole thing. From when the lady in red got out of the car. You should see it."
Officer Kim watched it twice, once at normal speed and once slowed down, with Officer Pruitt looking over her shoulder. When it was finished, the two officers looked at each other for a long moment. Then Pruitt went back to the patrol car and crouched down beside the open passenger door and spoke to Brooke Halston for a long time in a low voice. Theo could not hear what he said. But he saw Brooke's face change. He saw it crumple, and go white, and then go very still. And then he saw her nod, once, and look down at her hands, and say something, and Officer Pruitt wrote it down.
Nobody was arrested that morning. Nobody was charged. Officer Pruitt gave both women a card with a report number on it and told them that the incident had been documented and that the department would be in touch if anything further was needed. He told Mr. Farouk to call his insurance company and the fire department's hazardous materials line about the spill. He told Brooke, kindly, that she should get her ankle looked at, and asked whether there was somebody who could come and get her, and when she said no, there wasn't, there wasn't anybody, he looked at her for a moment and then said that he and Officer Kim would wait while she filled up her car, and then follow her as far as the bridge, to make sure she was all right.
While the officers were talking to Brooke at the patrol car, Mr. Farouk came out of the store again, more slowly this time, with a folded towel over one arm and something clutched in his other fist. He walked across the forecourt to where Dara was standing beside the open door of her grandmother's SUV, and held out the towel without a word, and she took it and pressed it against her face, and then against the wet knees of her tights, which