"Clayton, you hang anything in number seven?" he called.
"No. Did one of the installers leave a marker?"
Sherman shook his head. He remembered an older man in a brown flat cap visiting the lot the previous week. The man had asked politely whether he could sit inside a police car for a moment, explaining that he wanted to understand what the new patrol vehicles looked like. Sherman had allowed him to sit in unit seven with the vehicle stationary, although he now wished he had noted the visit properly. The stranger had thanked him and left without saying what had interested him.
"He seemed familiar," Sherman said. "Can't place him. I just remember the hat and the little notebook."
Clayton looked at the hanging tag. "Write it down in the install book. Until we know where it came from, we don't make guesses about why it's there." Sherman agreed, though he left the tag in place for the time being. His instinct said it was a small detail, and in his experience small details were either nothing at all or the beginning of a much larger repair.
That evening, Clayton drove home after the last customer left. The garage at his house smelled of mowed grass and bicycle tires. Hope's small pink bicycle leaned near the wall, and a school project about family businesses lay on the dining-room table beside a box of crayons. Erica was getting ready for an evening hospital shift when she saw the marks on his wrists.
She did not ask him to describe the incident right away. She fetched the first-aid kit, sat him at the kitchen table, and cleaned the abrasions while he told her what had happened. Her hands were steady because she was a nurse, but her jaw trembled when he described being forced to kneel in front of his employees. He had never seen her struggle so hard not to interrupt.
"They could have hurt you worse," she said at last. "You know that, Clay. A bad second could have changed everything."
"I know." He watched her wrap a thin dressing around his wrist. "That's why I kept still. I kept thinking that Hope was going to come downstairs tomorrow and ask why I wasn't there to make breakfast."
Hope had been listening from the hallway. She appeared carrying the rescued badge on a folded piece of newspaper, where Jaylen had left it to dry. The little gold star was still attached, although the ink on one edge had blurred. She laid it carefully between her parents.
"Did they read it, Daddy?" she asked.
"One of them did."
"Then why did he throw it away?"
Clayton looked toward Erica. He had spent ten years teaching Hope to read and to ask questions, and he could not tell her now that being able to read guaranteed that people would believe what was written. "Sometimes people decide what they think before they look at the facts," he said. "That doesn't make the facts less true."