She wrote the letter in four drafts across six weeks. The program kept the drafts, as it keeps everything, and the drafts — which no one outside the program was meant to read, and which entered the record of that year only through the coordinator's closing summary, filed with the probation office in the ordinary course — traced a course that the first three drafts make painful and the fourth makes plain. The first draft was an account of the winter's break-ins and the duties of vigilance, in which the boy at the gate appeared in the ninth paragraph as an unfortunate intersection. The coordinator returned it with the program's standard guidance attached. The second draft addressed the committee minutes and argued, with citations to the bound book's other pages, that her concern for the school's character had been a concern for standards that the committee applied to all. The coordinator returned it. The third draft began with the sentence I did not recognize him and spent two pages on the difference between a photograph and a face, and the coordinator returned it with a note that was not standard, and that the summary preserved: the program observed that the writer had now explained, at length and three times, why what happened was not what it seemed; the letter, if there was to be one, had to be about what happened.
The fourth draft was four paragraphs. It said that she had made a call to the emergency line in April and had reported that a boy was trying the doors of cars and looking into windows. It said that the boy was sitting on a bench, waiting for an appointment the school had given him, and that he had not done the things she reported, and that the record of this was complete and she had read it. It said that she had sat, before that April, in a committee room, and read his file, and seen his photograph, and written her objection, and voted against him, and that she could no longer maintain — to the program, which was the audience the sentence chose — that the boy at the gate had been a stranger to her. It said that the watching she had done over those streets for ten years had been, she believed, a form of care, and that she had to set beside that belief the record's other fact: that in two years, fourteen of her calls had sent the city toward people who were doing nothing, and that the people had had something in common that her fear had in common, and she did not have a sentence that made those two truths into one, and she was not going to insult the boy by pretending she did. It said she was sorry he had sat on a curb for her word. It did not ask for forgiveness, for a reply, or for the letter to be kept or destroyed; on those subjects, the coordinator's summary noted, the letter was silent, which the program counted as its first success.
The summary was filed. The letter was screened, approved, and placed in the program's envelope, and the coordinator wrote to the family's lawyer — the channel the terms required — to ask whether the family would consent to receive it. The letter waited in its envelope through the early summer, in a drawer of the program office, while the question traveled to a kitchen table in Baltimore and was considered there with the seriousness the family gave to paper.
The family's deliberation about the letter took one evening, and it was not the evening anyone would have predicted. The lawyer brought the program's inquiry to the kitchen table in the way of her profession, as a question with terms: the letter existed, it had been screened, it would be delivered if they consented and destroyed if they did not, and no one — this was the term Xavier asked about twice — no one would tell the writer whether it had been read. Renee said that the decision was her son's, in the tone of a person announcing a policy she intended to be bound by even at her own table. Moussa said the same, in the counselor's longer form: that a letter addressed to you is yours in the way a file is yours, to keep or to close, and that the family would do whichever he chose at the speed he chose it.