The concrete came up through my socks like something alive.

I set the box down along the left wall, neat, not blocking the middle, the way my mother had specified, and the baby shifted low and hard as I straightened, a sharp little turn that I chose to take as an opinion.

It was maybe ten degrees warmer in there than outside, which is to say it was still bitterly cold, and I stood for a moment in that gray unheated space my family had assigned me, a place to keep a person you’d stopped considering a person, and I listened to the quiet street.

And the quiet street stopped being quiet.

It began as one engine, low, coming up from the far end of the block, and then it was not one engine.

It was several, moving together, that particular disciplined sound of vehicles traveling in formation, and I felt it in my chest before I understood it in my head, the way you recognize a voice before you can place it.