Renee Diallo arrived on foot at ten minutes past four, alone, at a walking pace that did not hurry, because she had run the last block in her mind a hundred times and chosen, deliberately, to arrive the way a parent arrives and not the way a chief descends. She had walked from the library with her forum folder under her arm and her off-duty clothes unchanged, and she came around the corner of the brick wall to find her son standing inside the gate at the gatehouse, holding his folder, with his garment bag over his arm and his cello case on his back, free. He saw her and did not run to her; sixteen is an age at which running to your mother in front of police officers is a complicated act, but he crossed the drive at something close to it, and she put a hand on his shoulder and looked at him the way a person reads a face for damage, and found him upright, and angry, and all right, in that order.
She said very little at the scene, on purpose. What she said was procedural, and Brunner wrote it down, which was what she intended. She thanked the officers for the verification — she used that word — and she asked that everything be preserved: the dispatch recording of the call, the radio traffic, the gatehouse camera file, the visitor list as it stood that day, her own arrival on it. She asked for the officers' names and badge numbers in writing, although she knew them, because the asking was the record. She did not say the word chief. She did not have to; she could see in Rahman's face that the arithmetic had completed itself, and in Brunner's that it was still completing, and she spared them both the scene the afternoon had been drifting toward — a mother with rank, a son with a cello, an apology shaped like a salute — by refusing to hold it. Rahman said, Chief, and began something that might have become an apology or a report, and she stopped it with a courtesy so plain it could not be mistaken: Officer, my son has an audition. It has already started without him. What he needs now is the music building, and I believe you know the way faster than I do.
Rahman walked Xavier up the drive to the music building himself, carrying nothing, which both of them understood was the available form of the thing unsaid. At the door he stopped. He said: play well. It was the only sentence of the entire encounter that Brunner did not write down, because she was not there to hear it, and it survived the way such sentences do, in one memory only, unverified, and was worth exactly what unverified things are worth in the Diallo household — more than nothing, and less than the record.
Anton Weber had kept the chairs set out and the piano open, and he received Xavier in the doorway of the audition room with the folder still in the boy's hand and the interview clothes still in the garment bag, and Weber — who would reconstruct all of this later, for the school and then for the reviewer, with the bewilderment of a man who had prepared a room for music and been handed a police matter — did the thing that his whole profession had trained him to do. He asked Xavier if he wanted to reschedule. Xavier said no. Weber asked if he wanted a few minutes. Xavier took four of them, in the practice room, to change into the clothes in the garment bag, which were uncreased, and to warm his hands under warm water in the practice-room sink, because a cellist's hands in April, after an hour outdoors and twenty minutes of fear, are not instruments until they are warm. Then he came back into the audition room and sat down in the chair Weber indicated, and tuned, and played.