“Bron picked her up in the truck. She was interviewing someone, or looking at something, I don’t know what, but he told me he was going to get her, and he wanted to know was it okay if she drove my car. See, before I heard Grobian and Bron talking, we—Josie and I—were planning to run away to Mexico together, find Josie’s great-aunt in Zacatecas. We were going to take the train downtown to the Greyhound station. Josie doesn’t have an ID, so we couldn’t fly, and, anyway, if we flew my dad’s detectives would find us. We were going to take the Greyhound to El Paso and then hitchhike to Zacatecas.

“But then I decided I had to go back to Fly the Flag first—I had to see who from my family would be there, and I didn’t want Bron to know I was doing that. If I had known what they were going to do, I’d never have brought Josie, you have to believe that, Ms. War-sha-sky, because it was the most awful—” His shoulders started shaking; he was trying not to sob out loud.

“Who came?” I asked in a matter-of-fact voice.

“It was Mr. William,” Josie said softly after a minute, when Billy couldn’t speak. “The English lady, she drove up in Billy’s car. Mr. Czernin dropped us, see, over at the train station on Ninety-first Street. The factory is only, like, six blocks from the station. Billy carried my backpack, and we walked up, we picked up a pizza and stuff, and then we just went into the factory.”

She kept talking in the same soft voice, as if she didn’t want to startle Billy. “The big room where Ma used to sew, it smelled from the fire, but the front was still okay, you know, if you didn’t know the back was gone, you’d think it was still okay. So we waited, it was, like, I don’t know, three hours. It got kind of cold. And then suddenly I heard Mr. Grobian’s voice, and he and Mr. William came in. We hid under one of the worktables—the electricity was off because of the fire, and they had this big, portable work light they turned on, but they couldn’t see us.

“And then April’s dad came in with the English reporter. They talked back and forth, about April’s surgery, and what Mr. Czernin had done for Mrs. Jacqui and Mr. Grobian, and Mr. William, he said to the English lady, Mr. Czernin say you have—I mean, Mr. Czernin, he says you have a recording of all this?