On August 3, Amos watched the movement outside our supervised workroom as though he might read a result in somebody's pace. There were more people passing than he remembered from another session. I had noticed the activity too, but I did not know its purpose. When we reached the place where we could talk, he lowered his voice unnecessarily.
"Something must be breaking," he said. "You don't get that busy for nothing."
I was tired enough to want the gift he was offering: an afternoon made important by a conclusion neither of us had been told. We had done our assigned work. A breakthrough would have made the bus ride home feel different. I shifted my handbag and asked him what he had actually heard.
"Nothing direct. But you saw."
"I saw people going through a door."
"You don't have to make me sound foolish."
He was right about that. I had answered as though uncertainty belonged to him and precision belonged to me. I said I was sorry for the tone. Then I told him I wanted it to mean progress too, which was exactly why I did not trust the conclusion.
"Maybe it was," he said.
"Maybe. We weren't told."
We stood in an uncomfortable silence. Amos had offered the introduction that brought me here, and I did not want our friendship reduced to my correcting him. I asked whether he was going to the workshop the next day. He said Della had a stool that needed a new cover. We talked about the stool, and the ordinary subject let us leave together rather than apart.
At home Mara had brought a bag of peaches, some still hard enough to set aside. She was checking the wall calendar when I came in. I asked whether she wanted tea. She asked whether everything had gone all right, and I heard the old question under the new one: had this latest choice of mine done damage?
"It went well," I said. "Doing this will keep me from being caught again. I'm learning too much to fall for another one."
Her shoulders lowered. I watched relief reach her face, and for several seconds I let it remain there. Then the room outside the work session came back to me, Amos saying something must be breaking, my own voice asking what he had actually heard.
"That isn't something I can promise," I said.
"What isn't?"
"That I'll be safe because I volunteer. I shouldn't have said it."
She set a peach on the counter with more force than it needed. "You can't give me one peaceful minute?"
I wanted to take the correction back. No official was in our kitchen checking my language. There was only my daughter, tired after a day of other people's emergencies, wanting to believe I had become a person who could never make another expensive mistake. I could have left the promise where it lay and called it kindness.
"I can tell you what I did," I said. "I worked within the assignment. I asked when I wasn't sure. I didn't go looking for anyone. That isn't the same as being safe forever."
"Then what am I supposed to do with the worry?"
"I don't know how to remove it. I don't want to buy quiet by telling you something I can't know."
She pulled out a chair. I put water on and joined her while it heated. After a while she asked whether the people supervising me thought I was managing. I said no one had told me I could not continue, but I would not invent a private assessment on their behalf. She gave me a look that almost became a smile.
"You are making conversation difficult."
"I used to think confidence made it easier."
We sorted the peaches into ripe and unripe. It gave our hands a task while neither of us had an answer. Mara asked whether she could take two home, and I said she had bought them. She said she had bought them for me. I put two in her bag anyway, not as a bargain but because there were more than I could eat.
After she left, I nearly telephoned Amos to explain what had happened. Then I decided he did not need my kitchen offered as another lesson. I washed the cups instead. My afternoon had yielded no case forecast and no permanent safety. It had yielded a sentence I had been willing to withdraw before someone else had to depend on it.