“I don’t find him credible,” he says, “at all. He’s a pedophile.”

“What’s that?”

“Never mind,” he says.

It seems that nothing’s going to happen until Mr. Wallace recovers.

Based on his story, I’ll be charged with:

a. attempted murder

b. aggravated assault causing bodily harm

or

c. accessory after the fact

Mr. Galloway says he wants me downgraded to an accessory.

“What does accessory mean?” I say, trying not to sound sarcastic.

He looks at me over his half-glasses. I feel like he can look right through me. I can’t play any games and say I’m not a handbag.

“It’s one who, knowing that a party has been a party to the offense, receives, comforts, or assists that person for the purpose of enabling that person to escape.”

“So comforting someone is a crime?”

“Sara, I’m just wondering what you think Mr. Wallace will say,” he says absentmindedly, as if he’s trying to remember a mutual friend’s last name.

How the fuck should I know? I might say to anyone else. But I can’t talk that way to him.

Maybe it’s a mistake, but I tell him about what I did in the alley.

“Hmmm,” he says, “and where was your friend when you did that to Mr. Wallace?”

He always calls Justine my friend. That’s why I like him.

“She went to call an ambulance.”

That’s not true though. She ran off, and I waited too long and she never returned and when I went to look for her I saw only headlights and heard only a car honking back at me. She was gone.

“Did you think she was going to return?”

“I don’t know,” I say, because I don’t know. He writes notes in his file, as I stay quiet and think about the redness that I’ve tried to kick out of my memory.

Redness flowed from his heart; flush after flush, red as the poppies you pin to your chest on Remembrance Day. He convulsed, once, before he moaned.

Asshole, Justine said, and I knelt down.

It was me he wanted, it was me he hated, so blame it on me.

Sara, she said, what are you doing? He’s fine. Let’s go.

My knife was on the pavement, lying there like a severed silver limb.

Sara, I can’t stay here. He’s gonna wake up soon and go home to his wife. He’s fine.

She said her father was a famous poet and she wanted to find him before the police found her first. So go, I told her, just go.

I can’t go to jail, she said. I’ll kill myself before I go there. He’ll wake up. He’s alive!

I don’t blame her for running. I told her to leave. The last time I saw Justine was just like the first time I saw her run in the alley. I saw her wishbone legs lift, her heels kick off the ground.