As she climbed out, she looked back at me with the expression she had worn at the hospital two weeks earlier.

It was an expression I had never seen on her before the accident.

“Don’t let her in the garage,” she said.

Then she slammed the car door and hurried through the entrance.

I stayed in the parking lot long after the line of cars behind me had cleared.

Two weeks earlier, a nineteen-year-old bicycle courier named Lena Ortiz had been struck by a truck on the service road behind our houses.

She had survived, but she had not yet been able to walk without help.

The driver had disappeared into the dark.

Gwen had spent every day since telling people the crash was a terrible tragedy that had nothing to do with her family.

I knew why she was so certain.

I had seen something she did not know I possessed.

The service road ran behind Willow Bend Lane and ended at a locked maintenance gate near the old water tower.

Delivery drivers used it when the main street flooded, and teenagers sometimes rode bicycles along its shoulder to avoid the six-lane highway.

Maya had been riding there with Lena on the night of the collision.

They were friends from the library’s weekend literacy program, where Maya volunteered and Lena delivered meals between college classes.

At eleven forty-seven, Maya called me from the sidewalk, crying so hard she could barely say where she was.

“A truck hit Lena,” she said.

“It didn’t stop.”

I drove less than three minutes to reach them.

Lena lay near the white line while Maya knelt beside her, holding a folded sweater against her arm.

Her bicycle was bent beneath the guardrail, its front wheel spinning slowly in the wind.

A woman from the gas station had already called an ambulance.

I had worked as a rehabilitation nurse before opening my small bookkeeping practice, so I knew enough not to move Lena unless she was in immediate danger.

I checked her breathing and spoke to her until the paramedics arrived.

Maya kept repeating the same detail.

“The truck had a white stripe across the back.”

The police asked us to describe the vehicle separately.

Maya remembered the stripe, a dented tailgate, and two red lights reflected in the rain.

I remembered only the sound of a heavy engine moving away before I turned the corner.

The officers searched nearby cameras, but the municipal camera at the water tower had been offline for repairs.