Go back in, he told himself. Just go back in and ask. The worst he can say is no. You've heard no forty-one times. What's one more?
He did not go back in. He stood there.
It was from this position, standing between the two islands, in the middle distance between the store and the street, with a carton of milk in a plastic bag and his heart full of self-loathing, that Theo Navarro watched everything that happened next. He would describe it afterward to two police officers, to a lawyer, to a review panel of a national sports federation, to a reporter from the local news, and to his mother, many, many times. And each time, he would begin the same way.
"I was just standing there," he would say. "I wasn't even looking at them at first. I was looking at the store."
He noticed the gray SUV first. He could hardly help it. It pulled in off the street a few minutes before eight-thirty, slowly, carefully, its turn signal blinking for a long time before it turned, the way old people drive, and it eased up alongside pump one on the island nearest the street, and stopped, and sat there for a moment with its engine running and its windshield wipers going. Theo thought, idly, that it was probably somebody's grandmother. It looked like a grandmother car. Big and boxy and old and gray, with a dent in the back bumper and a crack across the windshield and a little cardboard air freshener shaped like a tree hanging from the mirror.
Then the engine stopped and the door opened and the driver got out, and Theo forgot about the store for a moment.
It was not somebody's grandmother.
She was tall. Very tall, taller than Theo, who was five ten, and she seemed taller still because of the shoes, thick platform sneakers that added inches. She was young, around his age, maybe a little older, with dark brown skin so smooth and even it looked almost polished in the flat gray light. Her hair was braided back from her face in rows so neat and so intricate that Theo, who had a cousin who did hair, knew instantly that they had taken somebody hours, and the braids were gathered into a long, thick ponytail that swung down her back and was wrapped here and there with something gold that caught the light. And she was dressed, in the rain, at eight-thirty on a Tuesday morning, at a cheap gas station on Linwood Avenue, like she was about to walk onto the cover of a magazine. A short leather jacket, black and brown. Little leather shorts. Black tights. She moved like an athlete. That was the other thing Theo noticed. Not like a model. Like an athlete. There was something about the way she stood, the way she walked around the back of the SUV to the pump, light and balanced and loose, every step placed exactly, like a cat, or a dancer, or someone who had spent a lot of time thinking about where her feet were.
She did not look at him. She did not look at anything. She opened the fuel door on the side of the SUV and unscrewed the cap and set it on top of the pump. She took her card out of the pocket of the leather jacket and slid it into the reader and pressed buttons on the screen without hurry. She lifted the green nozzle off its cradle, the one for regular, and fitted it into the SUV, and squeezed the handle, and locked it, and then stood there with both her hands resting on top of the nozzle, holding it in place, as if she did not trust the lock, and watched the numbers on the screen begin to climb.
Then she went very still.
It was a strange kind of stillness. Theo would try to describe it later and not quite manage. It was not the stillness of somebody bored, or somebody tired, or somebody lost in their phone. She did not have her phone out. She was not looking at anything. She was just standing there in the rain beside the pump, in profile to him, her chin slightly lifted, her shoulders loose, her weight balanced evenly on both feet, both hands on the nozzle, completely and absolutely still, the way a heron stands in shallow water. The rain beaded on the shoulders of her leather jacket and ran down in little silver lines. A strand of her baby hair had come loose at her temple and she did not fix it. She just stood there. She looked, Theo thought, like the calmest person he had ever seen in his life.