"I have a daughter, Judge. She's twenty-eight. She rents a house over in St. Johns and she's got a garden she's proud of, and when Officer Price called this in, and I heard the address, and I heard whose address it was — my first thought wasn't about the bureau. I want to be honest with you about the order of my thoughts. My first thought was that it could've been her, except that if it had been her, there'd have been no badge in her pocket to stop it, and nobody would be driving out to take eleven pages of notes. I'm going to do this right as far as I have authority to do it. I wanted you to hear that from me, early, before the machinery starts, because the machinery is going to say a lot of other things in a lot of other voices and most of them won't sound like this."
"Thank you, Sergeant," Naomi said quietly. "I believe you mean that. I also have to tell you that I intend to pursue this through every channel that exists, and that your bureau is going to be very uncomfortable, and that none of that will be personal, and all of it will be total."
"I'd expect nothing less, Judge. I'd be disappointed in the robe if it were less."
Aaron arrived at noon. He came up the walk of his own house past two police vehicles and a sergeant photographing his wife's rose bed, with his surgical scrubs still under his coat and his face set in the expression Naomi had seen only four times in twenty-six years: twice at funerals, once in an emergency room in the second year of their marriage, and once on the day a colleague had questioned, in his hearing, whether Naomi had earned her nomination. He did not raise his voice. Surgeons of his kind do not raise their voices; they lower them, and the temperature of a room goes with them.
"Where is the officer?" he asked Vasquez, pleasantly, as if inquiring after a dinner guest.
"Dr. Greer, Officer Holt has been relieved at the scene and transported back to the precinct. He won't—"
"Because I would like," Aaron continued, in the same pleasant register, "to be informed, as a physician, whether anyone examined my wife after she was assaulted, since I observe that no ambulance was called, and I would like it noted that the first medical professional to attend to the fifty-one-year-old federal judge who was sprayed with a hose on her own lawn by a police officer is her husband, arriving four hours later, and I would like the time of that noted as well. Can your notebook accommodate all of that, Sergeant?"
"It can, Doctor. It just did."
He went into the house then, and closed the door in a way that was not a slam and somehow contained one, and he found his wife in the kitchen standing at the window with her arms folded, looking out at the trampled bed of roses, and he did not say anything wise. He crossed the room and he put his arms around her from behind and she leaned back into him with the full, unguarded weight that she permitted herself with exactly one person on earth, and they stood that way, saying nothing, while outside the sergeant finished her photographs and the patrol cars, one by one, withdrew from Ashbury Lane.
"I was reasonable," Naomi said finally, into the quiet. "Aaron. I want you to know. I was so reasonable. I offered him every door out of it. I stood there in a wet slipper and I cited the situation to him like a syllabus, and it made no difference at all, because he had decided before he got out of the car. Do you know what he said to Daniel, before they parked? Mrs. Porter told me. She's been on the phone. He said, 'That house is worth almost a million dollars,' and then he said, 'Something doesn't fit.' That's the whole of it. That is the entire factual basis. The house is valuable and I don't fit in it."
Aaron's arms tightened. "Then we are going to spend whatever it takes," he said, "however long it takes, making him explain what he saw, on the record, under oath, in a room where 'something doesn't fit' has to become a sentence with a subject. And everyone who taught him he could work that way. Every one of them. Do you hear me? Not revenge, Naomi. Accounting. I know the difference and so do you, and we are doing the second one, completely, until it is finished."
"Yes," she said. "All right. Yes."
She turned in his arms and put her face against his shoulder, and did not cry, because she had used her thirty seconds, and because the doorbell chose that moment to ring. It was Evelyn Porter, holding a casserole dish she had no memory of assembling, a printed screenshot from her own doorbell camera on a sheet of paper gone soft at the corners from being gripped, and the expression of a woman who had come to enlist.