Then she looked at me.
I was sitting exactly where I’d sat for forty-four Sundays.
“You’re the one,” she said. “Aunt Patrice told me at the fun*ral. ‘Some girl we hired, don’t make a scene.’ I thought you were—” She stopped. “I thought you took him from me.”
“I thought I was st*aling something too,” I said. “Turns out we were both r*bbed by the same person.”
I held out the shoebox.
Forty-four tapes.
“He said give these to you. He said you should hear what he sounded like when he thought he was talking to you.”
Kiara sat down on the top step of her grandfather’s porch in her scrubs and took the box in both hands and did not open it.
“I don’t think I can,” she said.
“Then don’t yet.”
We sat for a while.
A car went by — a pickup, diesel, something old — and Kiara said, without looking, “Ford,” and then stopped, and put her hand over her mouth.
