As she was bending to unlock the car door, her bag slid off her shoulder, the wine bottle fell out and cracked against the concrete floor. She felt warm wine on her ankle. If she’d left the bottle in the room, the sad waiter could have enjoyed it. No time now for regret. She climbed into the car and backed out of her space.

She fished through the change cup on her dash, but couldn’t find the garage ticket. The scrawny man in the booth with the patch of pink skin along his neck had seen it all before and wasn’t impressed. “Thirty dollars,” he droned.

“Thirty dollars? I was here for less than two hours!”

He pointed to a sign beneath his window that said something about lost tickets and full prices, some infuriating bit of rules and regulations.

“I asked you when I arrived,” she said, “if there were any spaces on this floor. And you told me you’d just come on duty so you didn’t know.”

There, that ought to satisfy him, prove to him that she’d come in when she said she had. He pointed to the sign again, and she saw that she could present sworn affidavits, photos, and DNA samples and it wouldn’t matter at all. He had his job to do and he was doing it and had been doing it while she languished away an afternoon in a hotel room. Choose Your Battles, she told herself and handed over a fifty dollar bill. “Keep the change,” she told him. More kindness, unless it was self-flagellation.

She drove through the tangle of crowded Back Bay streets until she was out on Massachusetts Avenue. Three more stoplights and she’d be on the bridge to Cambridge. She checked her watch again. Two past four. Not nearly as bad as she’d feared. Gerald would be coming down the winding staircase of the music school clutching his books. She’d call the school in one minute. She was scarcely late at all.

Halfway across the long, flat bridge over the river, traffic came to a complete stop.