The accident report was shorter than Elena expected.

  Three pages. Clinical language. Measurements. Diagrams.

  Date: February 14, 1979.

  Weather: freezing rain.

  Visibility: reduced.

  Vehicles involved: two.

  She read it standing at the counter of the municipal records office, fluorescent lights humming faintly overhead.

  Her father had been driving.

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  The truck had entered the intersection from the left.

  There were no witnesses cited beyond the two drivers.

  The report stated that the truck driver claimed to have had a green light. Her father claimed he had not seen the truck.

  No charges were filed.

  No further investigation.

  Cause: indeterminate.

  Elena studied the attached diagram.

  Two lines intersecting at right angles.

  One line ended abruptly.

  She traced the paper with her finger.

  The crossing.

  In the February 1979 map, the river bent sharply at the southern edge, forming a crescent-shaped inlet. Beside it, in Mira’s handwriting: The Crossing.

  She imagined the argument he could not remember.

  Imagined silence in the car.

  Imagined the click of the turn signal he described in the letter — rhythmic, ordinary.

  How thin the membrane is between ordinary and irreversible.

  The report did not mention what hospital Mira had been taken to.

  It did not mention how long she had lived afterward.

  It did not mention whether her father had been injured.

  It did not mention grief.

  Elena folded the copy of the report and slipped it into her bag.

  Outside, traffic moved through the same intersection it had moved through for decades. No marker. No memorial. Just asphalt absorbing history without comment.

  Her father had redrawn the city for forty years.

  The city had never redrawn that moment.