Miriam worries at a fingernail. She knows that if she keeps up with it, she'll soon bite it down to the cuticle, so to stop herself, she taps out another cigarette and lights it.

"I told him, I dunno. Good for you, kid. I'm not exactly the sentimental type, but I liked Austin. He had that bold, dumb-kid outlook – everybody's your friend, and the best thing that can happen to you is to have a birthday. At that age, a birthday is like this… big bucket of potential – a piñata exploding with candy, a toy-box upended onto the floor. You get older, and you start to see how each birthday is really just a turnstile, and it takes you down, down, deeper, deeper. Suddenly, the birthdays are no longer about potential and become entirely the inevitable."

"And then you touched him," Paul says.

"You make it sound like I molested him in a van. For the record, he touched me. The kid grabbed my hand and went to shake it, like we were business partners now or something. Probably something his daddy taught him. How to shake hands properly like a big boy. He shook my hand, and that's when I saw."

Miriam describes it:

Austin would run out into traffic. Little sneakers pounding ground.

He'd be reaching up. Looking up. Little fingers reaching, waggling, as he bolted forth.

Chasing a Mylar balloon.

A white SUV would come out of nowhere.

It would knock his shoes off and send the boy's body tumbling like a doll across the asphalt.

It would happen twenty-two minutes after Miriam met him.

Paul sits there, quiet. He tries to say something, but then doesn't.

"Exactly," Miriam says. "Dead kid. Up until that point, I'd seen how lots of people were going to die. And yeah, I'd seen how a few kids were going to bite it, but they were always going to die… for lack of a better word, normally. Forty, fifty years later. They'd have their lives. Sad, but we all have to suck the pipe and take the Great Dirtnap. But this kid. Dead at age nine. Dead on his birthday."

She takes a long drag off the cigarette.

"And it was going to happen on my watch. I was there. I figured, here's my chance. I can stop this. I can be – what's the word? Proactive. Up until that point, all my efforts were passive. Guy's gonna die in two years in a drunk-driving accident, I tell him, 'Hey, dumb-fuck, don't drink and drive, at least not on June third,' and he can do what he wants with that information. But here? Now? A kid's gonna run out into traffic? How hard is it to stop a kid from running out into traffic? I figure, I'll show him something shiny. I'll just… Indian leg-wrestle the kid to the ground. I'll stick him in a goddamn trash can. Something. Anything.

"I got this great big swell of hope in me, you know? Like a bubble. I suddenly felt like… here it was. This was my purpose. This horrible thing that happened to me, this horrible so-called 'talent,' maybe it has a reason after all. Even if I stop one stupid little idiot kid from sucking a bumper at age nine, then it's all worth it, forever anon."