Chapter 14: What He Never Said

Dalton came down the steps toward the sound, with his hands out.

Ansel was between us before I saw him move.

"Captain," he said. "Not yet."

"That's my son."

"I know it is." Ansel did not raise his voice. "She decides when. Not you, and not this room."

Dalton stopped.

His hands stayed in the air in front of him, open, shaking, and he looked at the shape under my coat and could not seem to stop.

I could not stand there and let him look.

"Not in front of them," I said.

I turned and walked up the side aisle, past two hundred people who parted for me without a sound.

I pushed through the steel door at the back of the hall, into the apparatus bay.

It smelled of diesel and rubber and floor wax.

Engine 9 stood in the middle of it, red and clean, with its running boards still wet from the engineer's sponge.

I put my hand on the cold metal of the bay door and found the little window in it.

It was set at the height of a tall man's eyes.

I had to go up on my toes.

Across Cedar Street, my building stood in the evening light, a black shell with plywood nailed over the fourth floor.

My own kitchen window was a perfect square, level with this one.

There was no angle in the world from which a person standing here could have missed it.

My son quieted against my chest and began rooting at my coat.

"He saw it from here," I said, when I heard the steel door open behind me. "Or from the day room. Every one of them did."

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