The photograph showed Maya beside an older black woman named Elaine Brooks at a neighborhood fundraiser. Elaine wore a bright scarf and had one arm around Maya's shoulders. The memorial notice beneath it was dated only weeks before Maya's competition record ended. David closed the page, some questions did not belong to him. Whatever happened after Elaine died, Maya had chosen to put that part of herself away.
David understood enough about grief to respect a locked door when he saw one. His own wife, Patricia, had been in gone five years. Even now, there were mornings when he reached for the second coffee mug before remembering there was nobody across the kitchen table waiting for it. Loss changed the shape of ordinary things. Apparently, it had changed Maya's life too.
David returned to the photograph of Walter Brooks. The memory came back more clearly now. Years earlier, before David supervised campus safety, he had worked private security during a difficult stretch when money was tight and his confidence tighter. A transit employee's safety workshop had opened several seats to local workers. Walter Brooks had taught it for free.
David remembered expecting some loud instructor trying to impress the room. Walter had been the opposite. He wore mechanics coveralls with grease still caught beneath one thumbnail. He had looked around at 20 adults and said, if you leave here feeling tougher, I haven't taught you much. If you leave here harder to hurt and less eager to hurt somebody else, then we've done something useful.
David had never forgotten that. At the end of the workshop, Walter handed each participant a brass transit token, not valuable, not official, just an old token from a retired city route stamped with a bus number and the word home. Walter had held David's token out and said, remember what you're trying to get back to. David's token still sat in a drawer in his apartment and now Walter's granddaughter wore one around her neck. David stared at Maya's enrollment photograph.
The easiest thing would have been to tell somebody, Coach Rene, Dean Susan Miller, maybe even Tyler, if only to scare some sense into him. But the thought bothered David immediately. Maya had spent days refusing to advertise what she could do. Turning her history into campus gossip would take that choice away from her. So David closed the competition pages.
Her secret would remain hers. For now, across campus, Maya was finishing an evening shift at Second Table Community Kitchen. The Rene had driven more adults inside than usual. Wet coats hung over chair backs. Steam fogged the front windows while metal spoons clicked against bowls.
Maya moved between tables carrying coffee. Earl Simmons, 72, sat in his usual corner. You look tired, he said. You tell everybody that, only people who look tired. She smiled and topped off his cup.
At the far end of the room, Linda Hayes was folding napkins. The 68-year-old volunteer still moved carefully after the dizzy spell Maya had helped her through earlier that week. Linda watched Maya for a moment. College treating you all right? Maya's hand paused over the coffee pot.
I'm learning. That wasn't what I asked. Maya smiled faintly. Finally, Linda had lived long enough to hear the things people avoided saying. There's just somebody who thinks being loud makes him important.
Linda nodded. We're all full of those I noticed. And what do you think makes somebody important? Maya glanced around the kitchen at Earl eating beneath warm yellow lights at the exhausted adults coming in from the rain at the manager scraping the bottom of a soup pot trying to stretch dinner another half hour. Depends what they do when nobody's impressed, Maya said.
Linda smiled. Your grandmother teach you that? Something like that. Maya touched the brass token beneath her shirt. Walter had given it to Elaine years earlier.
Elaine had passed it to Maya before she died. Maya could still remember her grandmother closing her fingers around it. Your grandfather gave people these because he wanted them to remember they had somewhere worth getting home to. Elaine had smiled then. You remember that too.
The memory still hurt, but not in the sharp way it once had. Grief had changed with time. It had become something Maya carried instead of something that carried her. The next afternoon, trouble found her again. Maya stepped out of an economics lecture into bright September sunlight and immediately saw Tyler near the bottom of the stone steps.