But after two hours I almost wondered if they’d forgotten me. Something else was going on here in police headquarters. Something big. When I was ushered into my little room, the CID bullpen was a hubbub of activity. Uniformed officers were escorting young women to and from the desks of the detectives. Other officers were frog-marching shady-looking men in handcuffs. There was a babel of voices, mostly in foreign tongues.

I guessed that it was the aftermath of a news story I’d read online at the office this morning. Or—yesterday morning. According to the article, a multi-jurisdictional task force had conducted sweeping raids on dozens of motels and massage parlors in the tristate area. Operation Super Bowl, it was called, because the motels and massage parlors turned out to be pop-up brothels catering to the visiting football fans—men who were out for a good time every way they could get it. Some news accounts called the women in question prostitutes, while others called them victim workers. Which explained why the women looked both frightened and combative as the detectives questioned them. They weren’t sure whether they were being held as victims or witnesses or suspects.

I could commiserate. Which one was I? If I were a victim, the police would have taken my statement at the scene and driven me home. If I were a witness, they would have taken my statement at the scene and let me go, just as they did for the janitorial workers. Those men weren’t fingerprinted or photographed or swabbed for DNA. But I was.

You decide who you want to be, Mrs. Casco often told me, then be that person. Visualization, she called it. Visualize yourself as the person you want to be. When you see yourself that way, others soon will, too. In seventh grade, I knew only that I didn’t want to be what I was—the late-in-life accidental child of a beer-swilling, chain-smoking, spandex-wearing, good-time-girl wannabe. But with Mrs. Casco’s guidance, I soon figured out what I did want to be, and she taught me how to visualize it. I pictured myself as a superstar, smart, athletic, popular, the girl everyone wanted to know. By the time I reached ninth grade, everyone else saw me that way, too.

Now? Now I wanted to be a witness, only a witness, so that was what I would be.

Only a witness but also—the only witness. I alone could tell the police what happened in that elevator. I was here as a good citizen, a volunteer to help them sort through the evidence and arrive at the truth of the matter. I wouldn’t be defensive or cagey, and I wouldn’t be weepy or shaken, no matter how I might be feeling. My account would be the only one they would ever get. So long as it was plausible, so long as I was straightforward, they’d have to accept it as true. History was written by the victor, or so they said. I wouldn’t exactly call myself the victor, but I was the survivor, which meant I was the one to write the history of what happened in that elevator.