He played the Bach first, because it was first on his program and because Bach, in his experience, did not care what had happened to you before you played him; Bach cared about the architecture, and the architecture held. His hands remembered their profession before his mind had finished its. Somewhere in the second movement he stopped hearing the afternoon. Weber listened with a pencil in his hand and forgot, twice, to write. When the boy finished the second piece — a movement of the Elgar, played with the repaired-crack cello's dark warmth all through it — Weber set the pencil down and asked him the interview questions in a voice that had gone gentler than the one he used on the gatehouse telephone line, and Xavier answered them sitting very straight, in the suit that had waited in a bag on a curb, and the light in the high windows of the music building went the color of late afternoon, and outside, in the gatehouse at the bottom of the drive, a guard made an entry in a log, in pencil, in the column for irregularities, and a chief of police stood in the parking area making no phone calls at all, in full view, until her son came out.
The drive home took two buses, as the drive there had, and Xavier carried the cello on his back and the garment bag over his arm, and the folder in his hand, in the reverse of the morning's arrangement, like a film of himself run backward to the place where none of it had happened. His mother rode with him as far as their stop although her car was at the library, because that was the arrangement the afternoon had left them, and neither of them spoke about the stop until the second bus, when Xavier said, to the window, I did everything right, and his mother said, I know, and then, because it was the sentence the family had been building toward all evening without naming it, she said: that is not why it ended well, and it is not nothing that it ended well, and both of those are going to be true at the same time for a while.
At home, Moussa had made dinner and kept it warm without being asked how he knew to keep it warm. Counselors know about evenings the way musicians know about rests. He listened to the whole account at the kitchen table, in order, twice — the second time for the details, badge numbers included, which Xavier had repeated to himself on the curb the way his father had taught him, twice, like a phone number — and Moussa wrote nothing down until his son had finished, and then he wrote it all down, in one of the clothbound notebooks, the date, the times, the sequence, because a counselor keeps the record of having listened, and a father, on such an evening, keeps the record of what his child said while it was still exactly what his child said.
Then Renee Diallo went into the small room the family used as an office and did the most consequential thing she did that day, which was also the quietest. She wrote, in her own hand first and then typed, signed, and dated, a recusal. It was addressed to the deputy chief of operations and copied, by her instruction, to the mayor's office, to the department's inspector general function, and to the file. It stated that an incident had occurred that afternoon involving her minor son; that she had been present at its conclusion in her capacity as his mother only; that she recused herself, effective immediately and without exception, from every matter touching the incident, its review, its personnel, and its outcomes; that any inquiry the department made into the incident was to proceed exactly as it would for any citizen's child; and that any member of the department who brought the matter to her directly, other than through the channels her recusal established, should be directed to the deputy chief. She read it twice. She signed it. She sent it before she took off her shoes.