on life shearing a little too close to the hadith

So last Saturday on patrol, we're posted up on a streetcorner because someone was throwing bottles at people, around one in the morning. I'm standing just outside a little alcove in the brick building my back is to, where two homeless people are wrapped in blankets trying to get to sleep. One of them pushes the blanket down, revealing that she is a tiny, wizened old woman, missing some teeth. Barely audible, she asks the guy across from me if she can have a smoke. He's not a smoker, and he looks at me; she turns and querulously asks me if I can give her a smoke, so I bend down, pull my pack of Parliaments from one of my pouches, open it, and hand her a couple of cigarettes. As she's asking if I could give her a light, my lighter drops from the cigarette pack, so I just pick it up and hand it to her. "Actually, just keep the lighter," I say; it seems absurd not to, and I'm more likely to be able to get another one than she is. She says thank you, for our being out here and looking out for her. I shake her hand, and then she looks at me in particular, and thanks me again. "Of course, ma'am," I say, "Any time." It was an odd thing to say: Any time you're going to sleep on the street and need a cigarette, I'll be there? But it popped out, and there it was.

She looks up at me, directly into my eyes, her own huge under wrinkled eyelids. Almost too quietly to hear, she says, "Any time you need my help, too."
All I could say, with a sort of thrum in my breast, was "Thank you." And then we had to move on.
When I came by there a little less than an hour later, my shift over, she and all her things were gone without a trace. The other guy sleeping there hadn't moved.
What I said out loud to my comrades walking with me was, "I hope she's okay."
In my head, I was thinking many other things.