Brookside Street was waiting when they arrived. Mrs. Martinez stood beside the sidewalk with her children, Sarah Thompson had a pot of soup on her porch, and Mr. Washington leaned against the gate he had recently been ordered to repair. As Angela stepped out of the car, Mrs. Carter hurried across the street faster than Marcus thought a woman with painful knees could move. She wrapped both arms around Angela and kept them there until the younger woman's composure finally cracked.
"You shouldn't have had to go through that," Mrs. Carter said. "Not for helping me. Not for living here."
"You didn't cause it," Angela replied. "Please don't let anybody tell you that you did."
The neighbors had covered the damaged door and collected loose papers without rearranging the rooms before Marcus photographed them. Elena Martinez had brought back the grocery bags Angela left on the sidewalk, and Jimmy Parker had printed a still image from his video showing the exact moment Griggs forced Angela to the pavement. Nobody presented any of it as a weapon or a guarantee. It was simply what ordinary people could do when an official account no longer matched what they had seen.
Angela accepted help reluctantly at first. She was accustomed to tending other people's injuries, bringing food to families in crisis, and making the lists everyone else forgot, but now people were arriving with casseroles and asking whether she had slept. Sarah Thompson gently took the broken bulb package from Angela's kitchen counter and offered to replace Mrs. Carter's porch light herself. Angela almost objected, then realized that allowing her friends to help was not the same as becoming helpless.
Diana visited that evening and walked through the house with a contractor experienced in documenting property damage. The front lock and doorframe could be repaired immediately for safety, but she wanted photographs and written estimates preserved first. She explained that a civil rights claim was possible, yet a court would consider what the officers actually knew, what they claimed to fear, and whether the circumstances provided a lawful basis for entry and detention. Angela heard every word, because precision was the opposite of the reckless certainty that had brought Holt to her porch.
"And the military housing claim?" Marcus asked. "Holt keeps acting like we invented some federal status to scare him."
Diana shook her head. "Your private home is not automatically federal property because one spouse serves in the military. That isn't the protection we're relying on. We're relying on the constitutional rights that protect everyone's home, regardless of job or rank."