After the call, he wrote down the new memory before discussing it further. He marked the watch clearly and the face as unseen, then added that he could not remember the man's exact words. The page looked disappointingly incomplete. That incompleteness was the reason he trusted it enough to send it to Cole.
“I remember someone passing,” he said. “I need to tell you how little of him I actually saw.”
Cole returned the following morning with a series of photographs taken from event footage. She did not begin by showing Daniel the man with the watch; she asked him to describe his memory before giving him anything that might change it.
He remembered a lanyard, a pale shirt cuff, and a voice asking whether the stroller belonged to him. He had answered yes while wiping milk from Lily's chin, then looked down to fasten the bottle cap.
“Did the man touch the bag?”
“I don't know.”
“Did you hear him say anything else?”
Daniel closed his eyes, trying to hear past the noise he now associated with the railing. There might have been another sentence, but he could not separate it from things people had said afterward.
He told Cole that. She thanked him and asked whether he was willing to view the images, explaining that recognizing a familiar detail was not the same as identifying a face he had never seen clearly.
The footage came from a camera mounted above the reception's temporary entrance. It showed a man standing near Daniel's stroller while Daniel faced the river with Lily in his arms, but a canopy pole blocked the man's hands.
He wore a blue-faced watch and a contractor's lanyard. Daniel could not identify him from memory, and Cole did not supply a name.
Later that day, separate interviews and event credential records identified him as Nolan Vance. Judith recognized the man who had asked for her video, and the coordinator confirmed that Harbor Point Services had arranged equipment for the reception.
The camera did not show Vance placing anything in the bag. It did show him moving away shortly before Mercer approached Daniel, which made the sequence worth investigating without settling its meaning.
At the bureau, analysts were already comparing invoices from Price's drive with records obtained independently from the city. Some serial numbers matched properly installed equipment; others appeared on multiple claims, and several required physical inspection.
Cole resisted pressure to call the entire program fraudulent. Public money had purchased real equipment in some places, and sorting legitimate work from false claims would take longer than a dramatic headline.
Daniel heard little of that work directly. He spent the afternoon at physical therapy learning how to move his shoulder without guarding every breath, then returned to a shop where Ben had taped a handwritten list of repairs above the counter.
“Only the things you can do sitting down,” Ben said.
Daniel wanted to object. Instead, he repaired a mixer switch while Ben handled a refrigerator compressor, and for forty minutes he thought about wires rather than Mercer.
Then a man stopped outside and raised a phone toward the window. Daniel froze with a screwdriver in his hand until Ben stepped to the door and asked whether he needed service.
The man said he was making a local news video. Ben asked him to keep customers out of it, and he eventually moved on.
Daniel hated how badly his hands shook afterward. He called the counselor from the paper in his wallet and made an appointment before he could talk himself out of it.
That night, Evelyn came to dinner in ordinary clothes. She left her work phone in her bag and washed dishes while Tessa fed Lily, looking strangely like the older sister who used to make Daniel finish his homework before watching television.
He asked whether she had known about the old complaint's missing witness interview. She set down the plate she was drying.
“No. I should have checked whether you received a proper explanation.”
“You weren't commissioner then.”
“I was still your sister.”
He did not absolve her immediately, and she did not ask him to. They stood together at the sink until Tessa called them to look at Lily trying to hold her own bottle.
He stayed to help clear the dishes before leaving for home. Evelyn dried each plate and asked whether the shop needed anything she could provide as his sister. Daniel asked her to recommend him only when someone actually needed a repair, and she agreed. Neither wanted charity disguised as business, even when the intention behind it was love.