On a strange, warm day at the end of March, Polly had been riding her bicycle home from the restaurant when a car blew past a stop sign. It clipped her and sent her sideways, nothing like a horse fall, no midair time to think of how to handle it. Her head hit the pavement, but the first, larger feeling was the airless sucking and pain of her deflated chest, the fear that another car would come, rage at the person who got out of his car to scream at her.

The old man who’d hit her (twice, in emails to friends, she’d written bit) howled while witnesses waited with them for the police: Stupid girl, stupid girl, how dare you? He screamed harder when people insisted he was at fault. He was malign and narrow-faced; later, she learned he was the candy factory owner who lived on Yellowstone Street, collected old cars—he’d dented a Bentley on Polly’s bike—and, according to Josie Wall, spent too much time watching children through his plate glass window. When the sheriff, Cyrus Merwin, arrived, Polly said she felt fine—look at her talk, look at her move, look at her not beating this frail mutant bloody for nearly killing her. Cy stalled for the paramedics, but as they arrived in the town’s second-best ambulance, the radio went wild about an accident on the interstate. When the old man turned blue and collapsed into a heap, Cy forgot Polly.