“Any time you ever need someone to listen.

Always.”

He drove home that evening the long way, past the station, and he sat in his car in the lot for a while before he went in, the way he sometimes did after the cases that stayed with him.

He had been thanked a great deal over six months — by Pilar, by the prosecutor, by his own captain, by a local reporter who wanted to make him the hero of the piece.

He had declined the reporter, and deflected the rest, and he meant the deflection every time, because he understood something about that afternoon that the people thanking him did not.

He had not done anything extraordinary.