Then he came back and moved both girls gently out of the sightline from the lot, behind the solid part of the counter, where the glass could not show them.

It was, on paper, an unusual thing for an officer to do — to lock the public doors of a police station against a citizen in the parking lot.

He knew that, and he knew a defense attorney would spend months later trying to make it into misconduct.

He locked them anyway, and he never once second-guessed it, because he had weighed the only two things that mattered against each other in the second it took to cross the floor.

On one side: a man’s expectation, backed by charm and a medical degree and a good coat, that a door would open for him.

On the other: two children, one of them ill, who had said in their own words that this man had hurt them and that they were afraid to go home.