"You didn't bring it," she said, with sudden, furious loyalty. "They did. He lunged at me, Dad. I remember his hand. Don't be sorry like you did it." Her voice cracked on the last word and she hated it visibly, and Caleb let the crack stand.
"I know," he said. "I know."
Later there were practical things, because in this house grief and logistics had always shared a table. A detective would want to talk to her in the next day or two, with Caleb present the whole time, and she could stop whenever she wanted; Leah's people had already asked, politely and in writing. The school counselor would be told only that there had been an incident at home β the rest was Ava's to share or not. No one was to come to the house Caleb hadn't cleared; a county car would pass by more often for a while, and Mr. Rhodes's cameras, Caleb said dryly, had achieved the importance he had always claimed for them.
Ava listened with her chin up. Then she said, "The basketball."
"What about it?"
"Marcus's ball. The shot one. Where is it?"
Caleb pictured it: the collapsed thing he had carried in with two fingers, like something dead, and dropped in the trash bin by the garage door. "I threw it out, sweetheart. It was ruined."
"You can't," she said, on her feet, ice bag hitting the floor. "It was fine, it was just a ball, and they shot it, and if we throw it away then it's like they finished it. Like the story is they came and broke our stuff and we cleaned up."
Caleb went with her to the garage without arguing. He understood that this was not about a ball. The bin lid clanged. He lifted the ruined basketball out himself β deflated, lopsided, one panel split where the round had torn through β and set it on the workbench under the hanging light.
"We'll keep it," he said.
"In the garage," Ava decreed. "Not hidden."
"In the garage."
She nodded once and limped back inside ahead of him, and Caleb stood a moment longer in the smell of sawdust and motor oil, looking at the ball, before he followed her.
The house tried to sleep after that. Marcus's light stayed on late; Caleb heard Ava get up once for water and stand a long time in the hallway, and he stood with her without making it a conversation, until she went back to bed. His phone charged on the counter, face down, with one interview confirmed for the morning, boys first, parents present. He checked the doors twice, from habit older than fear, and finally sat in the dark kitchen listening to his house breathe, awake so the children didn't have to be.
The interview room at the county building had been chosen, Marcus suspected, to look harmless: pale walls, a low table, a box of tissues placed with intent, a water cooler that gurgled at intervals. It did not feel harmless. It felt like a room where everything you said went into a file and stayed the exact size you had said it, forever.
He sat between Caleb and a woman from Leah's team who wrote his answers down even though a recorder sat blinking between them. Jamal went in after him, with his mother on one side and his father standing behind her chair with a hand on her shoulder the whole time. Theo's parents came together, both pale. Eli, at nine, was interviewed briefly and gently, mostly about where he had been standing and who had grabbed his arm β Jamal, pulling him back β and he kept asking whether he had done the right thing by freezing, until the interviewer told him that freezing had kept him exactly where his brother could reach him.
Marcus told it in order. The park. The phone near the storm drain. Charging it at his desk. The missed calls. The deleted video. Waking his father. Then the driveway: the SUV, the question about the phone, his father's voice going quiet, the hand on his shoulder, the shot β no, he corrected himself, the shot had come first, before anyone arrived, the ball in midair. He stumbled there, because in memory the order kept rearranging itself around the sound, and the interviewer let him back up and do it again without impatience.
"Take your time," she said. "Order matters, but accuracy matters more. If you're not sure, say you're not sure."
He was not sure, twice, and said so, and felt obscurely ashamed until Caleb said, from beside him, "That's how honest people sound, Marcus," and the shame loosened.
His shoulder still ached where the broad-shouldered man had grabbed and yanked him toward the SUV. He described the man's hand, the ring, the silver shield pin. He described Jamal kicking the gun under the truck, and said it before Jamal could be asked to, because they had agreed in the parking lot β Jamal, Theo, and he, in a huddle that felt like halftime in some ruined sport β that nobody would trim anything to protect anybody else.
Across the hall, in rooms Marcus never saw, the neighbors were giving their own statements. Mrs. Donnelly told hers, by all later accounts, three times to three different people, each time returning to the shoes: they hadn't been government, not with shoes that shiny, and she had known it before the shooting started. Mr. Rhodes handed over his street-camera footage with the solemnity of a man presenting a firstborn, along with a written log of license plates from that evening, in a hand so neat it looked printed. Two other neighbors admitted they had seen the black SUV idle at the curb and assumed it belonged to someone important, and then had to sit with that assumption in front of a federal interviewer, which Marcus thought might do the cul-de-sac more good than anything.