She looked tired.
“People want to know when it will be over.”
“So do I.”
She shook her head.
“Some mean the inquiry. Some mean having to hear about it.”
I had no useful answer.
The distinction stayed with me longer than any statistic in the findings.
Briggs's explanation changed during the administrative inquiry.
At first, he said I matched the description and became physically resistant when he attempted to confirm my identity. He described striking me as a trained response to contact with his wrist.
Later, he said radio interference prevented him hearing identifying details.
The two accounts were not impossible to reconcile in theory.
The recording made them difficult to reconcile in fact.
He acknowledged the completed description after a clean transmission. There was no overlap on the preserved channel at that point. Investigators also examined whether his equipment showed a reported malfunction before he stopped me.
It did not.
That absence did not prove every word reached his attention. It did place limits on the claim that the recording concealed interference.
Vega interviewed me again to clarify sequence and address specific issues after my initial recollection had been fixed.
Paul attended.
She explained that the department's compelled administrative process and any separate criminal inquiry involved different rules. Information would have to be handled accordingly. An employment finding would not automatically become a criminal verdict.
Paul asked that the separation be reflected in the correspondence to avoid confusion later. Vega agreed and identified the officials responsible for each route. It was a practical exchange, almost dull. I began to value those moments. They were the opposite of the corridor, where one person had tried to make an unsupported conclusion do the work of every missing step.
I knew those distinctions.
I still disliked how they felt when the calendar carried my name as a witness.
Vega asked me to describe the wrist contact again.
“He held my upper arm. I pulled free. When he reached a second time, I moved his wrist away.”
“Did you have anything in that hand?”
“No.”
“Were you trying to injure him?”
“No.”
“What did you say?”
“I remember telling him not to touch me. I cannot place every word against every movement precisely.”
She recorded the limitation.
I felt a small, irrational urge to improve it.
Paul must have seen something in my face, because he asked for a short break afterward.
In the corridor, he said, “An accurate gap is better than a confident addition.”
“I tell people that.”
“Then you get to use the advice too.”
We returned to the room.
Vega showed the relevant statement Briggs had provided through representation. It characterized my questions as attempts to evade a lawful identity inquiry and my movement as an assaultive escalation.
I read it slowly.
The account contained recognizable actions arranged around a different beginning.
My name had become an unverified claim.
The extension had disappeared.
The first grip had become a necessary response to noncompliance.
By starting later, the report made everything afterward look more reasonable.
“It leaves out the available checks,” I said.
“We're examining that.”
“And the first contact.”
“We have witness accounts addressing it.”
I pushed the paper back.
For a moment, I wanted Vega to agree with me more plainly. I wanted her to stop qualifying language around something I had felt against my face.
Then I looked at the exhausted care with which she kept separate columns for claims, sources, and findings.
She was doing the work I needed, even when it did not sound like reassurance.
I asked whether there was anything else she needed from me.
“One thing,” she said. “If this proceeds to a contested employment hearing, will you testify?”
“Yes.”
The answer came faster than the feeling behind it.
I had spent years entering rooms where other people waited to give evidence. I knew the chair, the microphone, the oath, the professional habit of asking a difficult question without changing one's voice.
I had not yet imagined occupying that chair with Briggs sitting across from me.
On the drive home, I pulled into a quiet parking area and let the engine idle.
The afternoon had left me angry in a way that required somewhere to go before I could safely take it into traffic.
I called Denise.
“Tell me something ordinary.”
She told me her washing machine had eaten a sock and that she was considering reporting a pattern of misconduct.
I laughed, then sat quietly while she stayed on the line.