Marcus knew that feeling. By the month's end, suspicious-account alerts had placed temporary restrictions on his business banking, and the paperwork required to remove them took days. He counted twenty-three dollars in cash at the counter one evening while the refrigerator hummed on borrowed time. Twenty-three dollars was not enough to replace the food he needed for tomorrow. It would not pay the staff he had already sent home early.
He closed his eyes and remembered Eleanor asking him what kind of business he wanted to run. He had answered that he wanted to feed people. She had said, "Then you can spend the rest of your life figuring out how, because nobody builds a sanctuary by accident."
The front bell rang. Derek entered with five men and a leather document folder tucked beneath his arm. He looked around at the empty tables, the dark display case, and the black square where Eleanor's photograph had hung. Then he smiled with the satisfaction of a man inspecting a job nearly finished.
Derek spread the transfer agreement across a table that had not been used all day. Behind him, the five men fanned out with the unconscious coordination of people accustomed to arriving together and deciding where everyone else would stand. Marcus recognized two from earlier visits, but the others were new. One had a shaved head and a heavy watch; another kept looking toward the kitchen door as though checking possible exits.
"I'm giving you one last chance to leave with something," Derek said. "After tonight, you're going to leave with nothing."
"The lease isn't yours to take."
"That's a very old-fashioned way to look at a business. Rights are only useful when you can afford to enforce them."
Derek nodded toward one of his men. A chair crashed against the wall. Another flipped a table, sending a sugar dispenser and a salt shaker across the floor. The small sounds of destruction seemed to amuse them more than any meaningful damage. Marcus stayed beside the counter, where he could see the front and back doors without moving.
"You can smash every chair in here," he said. "You'll still need my signature."
Derek's expression hardened. He walked to the wall, removed the last surviving boxing photograph, and tore it down the center. In the image, twenty-five-year-old Marcus had been lifting his gloves in victory while Eleanor, much younger then, watched from ringside. The split ran through her face. Derek let the pieces fall, and Marcus had to steady himself against an impulse that rose out of years he thought were over.
"There he is," Derek said quietly. "I was starting to wonder if you had any pride left."
Marcus bent to retrieve the photograph. "Pride doesn't require an audience."
Derek pulled out his phone and held it where Marcus could see the screen. The image showed Tommy Washington walking along the sidewalk outside his school, wearing the backpack he had left on the diner's coat hook dozens of times. Another photograph showed the boy approaching the recreation center. Marcus stood upright, slowly enough to conceal how sharply the pictures affected him.