"No," she said. "It's honest. Honesty is allowed."
They drove home through streets washed black and shining. In the apartment, Isaiah assembled his clarinet without being asked and played a melody Ortiz had given him for fun—not for grade, not for chair, just for the pleasure of notes arranging themselves into meaning. Naomi stood in the doorway and listened. She thought of the grey car shrieking into the lot. She thought of the black folder spilling pages. She thought of her own voice saying take your hands off him, and of how some sentences become hinges on which whole lives turn.
Four years later, on a wet Thursday in October, Naomi Reed stood in the back of a high school auditorium that was not Millbrook's and felt the old adrenaline rise like a tide that recognized the moon.
Isaiah was seventeen. He had grown into his hands. The mustard cardigan hung in his closet at home, retired from daily wear but not discarded; he put it on sometimes when he studied, a private joke with his younger self. Tonight he wore concert black. His clarinet case leaned against a chair backstage. Northside had fed into Westbridge High, where the wind ensemble was serious enough to travel and kind enough, under Ortiz's quiet network of recommendations, to treat trauma as information rather than gossip.
Naomi had finished law school the previous spring. She worked now at a small firm that took education cases other offices called messy. Marta had cried at her graduation and then hired her before the mortarboard hit the chair. On Naomi's desk sat a framed photo Ruth had taken the night of Isaiah's first Northside showcase: boy, clarinet, astonished smile. Beside it sat a second photo from last summer—Isaiah at a music camp in another state, laughing with his head thrown back, the hold finally not visible in his posture.