She studied him for another second, decided it was true, and then said, "My history project was due Friday. Mrs. Callaway gave me an extension."
"That was good of her."
"She said it was under the circumstances."
Maya tilted her head slightly.
"She also said she'd seen the news."
Daniel looked at her.
"What did you think about that?"
Maya considered the question seriously, the way she considered most things.
"I think a lot of people are going to have opinions about something they weren't actually there for," she said.
Daniel almost smiled.
"That's probably right."
Maya looked at the courthouse behind him, then back.
"Sandra told me you work for the government."
"I do."
"Like the FBI?"
"A different part, but similar."
She absorbed this.
"Were you investigating those police officers the whole time we lived here?"
"Yes."
Another pause.
"Did you know something bad was going to happen to you?"
"I knew it was a possibility," he said. "It's part of the job."
Maya looked at him for a long, quiet moment.
Then she said with complete gravity, "You should have told me."
Daniel nodded slowly.
"You're probably right."
"I would have worried less," she said, "if I had understood what was happening instead of just seeing it."
He looked at his daughter, this 10-year-old person who had somewhere in the past week crossed a threshold he hadn't seen coming.
And he felt something shift in him.
Not collapse.
Something more like a door being walked through by someone who lived in the house and had simply never been shown that room before.
"When we get home," he said, "I'll explain as much as I can."
Maya nodded.
It was the nod of someone who had already decided this was the minimum acceptable outcome and was prepared to negotiate further.
She zipped up her coat, took his hand, and looked down the steps toward the sidewalk.
"Can we have the tomato soup tonight?" she said. "I never got it."
"Yes," he said. "We can have the soup."
In the months that followed, Lakeshore moved through its reckoning the way cities do.
Unevenly.
With resistance in some quarters and exhaustion in others, and with the slow emergence of a new shape from the wreckage of the old one.
The Lakeshore Police Department was placed under a federal consent decree that mandated an independent oversight board, a revised evidence-handling protocol, and a complete audit of every arrest made by officers in Mercer's unit over the previous four years.