He braces himself for Niall’s temper, but just gets another pat on the knee, and then Niall points to the dashboard, where a yellow mailing envelope rests. Lance doesn’t let himself snatch it; he takes it calmly, shooting Niall a sidelong, rueful smile, and shakes out the contents into his lap.

The life-changing declaration is just one page of straightforward black-and-white with the prosecutor’s and judge’s signatures at the bottom. Lance looks at it for a long time. A part of him wants to give Niall a piece of his mind, jump out of the car, and walk the six-or-so miles back to Robbie’s driveway. But he still needs the car. Not because he cares about the car at all, though it’ll be convenient to have. But because he desperately needs a particular item from his luggage in the trunk.

The police station is so nondescript, they circle the block once before they see the sign on the low brick building that confirms that they’re in the right place. There’s a small, unfurnished vestibule inside, and a woman behind a plate glass window wearing red acrylic glasses. She looks up from a cell phone in a fuzzy yellow case, and then leans in to speak into a slim microphone mounted in front of her face. “Can I help you?” Her voice comes out distorted and from the wrong direction—from a cheap speaker somewhere behind Lance. He ignores the urge to look reflexively in that direction and smiles at her, about to approach her when Niall does, instead.

“We’re here to pick up a vehicle in your impound,” he explains with one of his smiles, but it doesn’t seem to have its usual effect on the woman. She pushes up her glasses and blinks at him.

“Name?”

“Lance Taylor.”

Something registers briefly in the woman’s face, and she stares at Lance over Niall’s shoulder. She must know who Lance is. For a moment, he thinks her frown has something to do with his past or his father, even though he has no idea who she is.

But then she says, flatly, “Mr. Taylor, if you could step up here?” and he realizes that she was just discomfited by Niall behaving like Lance’s personal agent—and, well, that makes two of them. He edges past Niall to the window and gives her a strained smile.

“I.D.,” she says, stretching out each letter into its own word, eye dee, “please.” To Lance’s relief, she’s back to being businesslike. He fishes his wallet out of Johnny’s pocket and shows her his driver’s license.

Then, she stamps a few things and slides a sheet of paper to him through a tiny, plastic flap that’s almost invisible between the bottom of the plate glass window and the top of the shallow, chipped counter.

“That’s an inventory of everything we found in the vehicle. If you agree with the list, sign at the bottom. If you believe there is something missing from the list, I’ll give you another form to fill out to register the dispute.”