When I was up on the street again, I could see that the rescuer wore the dark-blue jumpsuit of a paramedic. His partner, younger yet and blond, was taking care of the boy. The Asian medic glanced over at them, sized up the situation as under control, and sat on his heels next to me.

“I’m all right,” I said.

“I know,” he told me.

There we were: a tall, courteous kid with a postmodern haircut and a half-drowned county detective.

“Sarah Pribek,” I said, holding out my hand. “Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department.”

He shook my hand. “Nate Shigawa,” he said.

“Pleased to meet you,” I said.

From behind him came a high, thin cry. The newspaper driver had returned, and she wasn’t alone. With her was the boy who’d raised the alarm about his fallen brother and a woman in an inexpensive print dress and long black hair tucked back in a head-scarf. The woman was looking around- not at her son, whom the young EMT was attending to, but everywhere else. Into the back of the ambulance, on the nearby ground, at Shigawa and me. She spoke rapidly in the same Slavic tongue as her son.

When her sharp, urgent inquiries earned her only blank looks, she ran to the bikes. She pointed at one of them, then to the boy who stood by the Toyota, dry and unharmed. Then she picked up the second bike and pointed to the boy on the stretcher. Then she thumped the handlebars of the second bike, as if to indicate a rider there.

Shigawa and I looked at each other, having the same terrible realization: this woman has three children.

We both went to the railing, to look down at the water rolling below, unbroken by anything that resembled a hand or a foot or a scrap of material. It had been too long. Far too long.