I sat down next to her and started bathing her wounds. “Max is going to come over—he’s pretty worried. And he’s hunting up a doctor to take a look at you.”

“I don’t need a doctor. I am a doctor. I can tell there’s nothing serious the matter with me.”

It was a relief to hear her speak. “Do you remember how the accident happened?”

She frowned impatiently. “It wasn’t an accident. I told you at the restaurant, someone hit me. Could you bring me some ice for my head, please?”

I sighed to myself as I went back to the kitchen. The accident was going to go into Lotty’s annals of traffic mishaps—someone had hit her. Just more forcefully than usual.

I wrapped the ice in a kitchen towel and placed it gently on the purple bump. “Did you report it to the police?”

“The police came. They tried to make me go to a hospital, but I knew I was late to meet you, and I had to see you, Victoria.”

I gently squeezed the fingers of her injured arm. She lay silent for a few minutes.

“I think they wanted you, you see.”

“The police want me?” I asked cautiously.

“No, Vic. The people who hit me.”

The ground shifted underfoot. “Lotty, darling Lotty, I know you’re in pain and maybe concussed besides, but can you please tell me what happened? I thought you were in a car accident. I know the Trans Am is bashed in.”

She nodded, then winced. The towel with the ice fell off her head onto the pillow with her movements. When I’d retrieved the cubes from the bed she marshaled her wits and told me her story. She’d come home from the clinic to shower and change. On her way out, just before she turned from Sheffield onto Addison, another car had come out of nowhere—as they always did with her—and plowed into the front of the Trans Am.

She frowned. “I must have hit my head on the windshield then, but I don’t think that cracked it—I think they did that when they started hitting the car with their bats. Anyway, I was furious. I can’t stand these reckless drivers. They were never like that in London, and London traffic makes Chicago look like a cow town. So I got out of the car to tell them what I thought of them and to get their insurance information. That’s when they climbed out and started hitting me. I was too stunned to react. Besides, I’m not like you, I didn’t train under Muhammad Ali.