That weekend, the first article about the incident appeared in the Fairhaven Ledger. Its headline described the new police chief being handcuffed while washing his own car, and beneath it was a still image from Evelyn Price's video. Jordan hated the photograph, not because it embarrassed him, but because he could not stop imagining what it would mean if the man on the hood were his younger brother, a neighbor's son, or somebody who had to return to the same street without anyone in authority knowing his name.
Nia watched him reading the story on his phone. "You need to put that away for a while," she said.
"It's everywhere."
"I know. But our entire life cannot become that fifteen seconds. We still have a leaking bathroom faucet, no curtains in the spare room, and a kitchen full of boxes we were supposed to unpack last weekend."
Jordan looked around. She was right. He had come home from his first week as chief and spent most of Saturday thinking about reports instead of the life they were trying to make together. He set the phone facedown on the table and followed her upstairs to the spare room, where the curtain rod rested on the floor beside a pile of unopened hardware.
"Can you hold this level?" Nia asked.
"I can manage a curtain rod."
"Good. Because apparently the rest of the world has decided you can manage an entire town, and I'd like to start with something that has instructions."
He laughed for the first time that day. The sound surprised them both. For an hour, they worked together on the curtains, argued gently about measurements, dropped one screw behind the dresser, and managed to finish the job without checking a single message. When they stepped back to admire the result, Jordan felt the strange relief of completing a task whose success could be measured simply by looking at it.
Downstairs, the phone was waiting. So were the reports, the witnesses, the angry messages, and the people who wanted him to choose a side. But he had begun to understand that doing the work well would require him to remain a whole person outside it. He could not build a department that treated people with dignity if he allowed the job to consume every piece of his own life.
The outside investigation lasted ten weeks. That was longer than the public expected, and considerably longer than the people demanding an immediate dismissal thought reasonable. Investigators interviewed Jordan, Nia, Karen, Evelyn, Ortega, Avery, and Voss; reviewed the body-camera recordings, radio traffic, dispatch audio, and neighborhood footage; and examined the department's previous complaint files. They also looked at whether supervisors had discouraged employees from recording concerns and whether officers had taken action based on private requests from influential residents.