She thinks—All a woman wants is for a man to listen like that. Any man.

“I haven’t—yet—seen much of the city. I want to see more. All I’ve done is drive from the airport and out to the hospice. I was so afraid, going into the building … I saw Mia this morning, and I stayed until the nurse asked me to leave so that she could rest. I’ll see her tomorrow morning. Today I had to get away to Belle Isle. I didn’t know how Belle Isle would be—if it would be—deteriorated and dangerous … Remember what they’d said, speaking of the ‘race riot’ in the 1940s, the ‘grass of Belle Isle was red with blood’ … I’ve always remembered that—those words. Maybe it isn’t even true. Wasn’t true. ‘The grass was red with blood.’ I feel that time is slipping from me. Through my fingers.”

Why is she telling this stranger these wayward, rushing thoughts? She has not the slightest idea, except (perhaps) she wishes to throw herself upon his mercy.

A Detroit Police Department cruiser passes, headed out to Belle Isle. If she were in trouble, at risk, she had only to lift her hand, to wildly wave her hand to attract the police officers’ attention; at once they would brake their vehicle, they would come to her assistance. A well-dressed (white) woman on the Belle Isle Bridge summoning help from Detroit police officers would not be ignored.

The fact that L.K. merely glances at the police vehicle, that she does not lift her hand, would seem to be evidence that she is not at risk.

Indeed, Vann and L.K. comprise a couple. To the casual eye, a slightly mismatched couple strolling together on the Belle Isle Bridge.

With a sudden thrill of happiness she thinks—Now he will take my hand. He will hold my hand tenderly.

Vann doesn’t take her hand. Perhaps Vann would like very much to take her hand, but he does not.

And when he walks close beside her, close enough to nudge against her, by accident or by design, L.K. eases away, clutching her canvas bag.

Halfway across the bridge. The police cruiser has vanished. Few pedestrians are crossing now. L.K. remembers: it is not the Belle Isle Bridge, but the MacArthur Bridge. Yet no one who lives in Detroit and visits Belle Isle is likely to call the bridge the MacArthur Bridge.

Vann is telling L.K. that he doesn’t believe in extrasensory perception—“whatever the hell that is”—but he’d had a dream the other night in which there was a woman—“a woman like you, who came to my studio and wanted to see my new work and so I showed her …”

L.K. takes exception—A woman like you. How condescending! Insulting! Doesn’t this arrogant man know that there is no woman like her, there is only her?

“Really. And what did ‘this woman’ think of your art, Vann?”

L.K.’s voice is so cold, Vann understands that he has blundered.