Vince blinked. "We were just messing with him."
"Those were his father's tools."
"How was I supposed to know?"
Garrett did not answer immediately. He had no good answer because the question was the very problem. Neither man had cared who the tools belonged to, or what the book cost, or whether the stranger walking past their gate had been hungry. They had known only that he looked weak enough to make a safe target. Garrett recognized that in himself and felt the recognition like an injury to a part of his identity he had assumed was indestructible.
"You don't need to know somebody's history to leave their things alone," he said at last.
Vince stood silent. He had spent years learning to imitate Garrett's hardness. Hearing the same man criticize the behavior that imitation had produced left him looking briefly like a schoolboy caught copying an answer from the wrong page. Garrett looked away before the conversation could become another argument.
Near the fence, Nolan Briggs approached Owen. His face was red, and he had to pause twice before he found the beginning of a sentence. "That float," he said. "I really did check it."
"I know," Owen answered. "I wasn't calling you a liar."
"I should have checked it better." Nolan swallowed. "My father used to tell me you can do the same job ten thousand times and still miss the tenth-thousand-and-first variation. I suppose I forgot he meant me too."
Owen nodded, uncertain how to respond to an apology that had not quite been spoken. Nolan looked at the toolbox and pointed to the old wrench. "You get that from somebody?" he asked.
"My father."
"He teach you everything you know?"
"He taught me how to start learning. I had to do the rest."
Nolan considered the answer for a moment, then extended his hand. Owen shook it. The older mechanic's grip was dry and familiar, the grip of somebody accustomed to holding tools rather than using strength to intimidate. Nolan left without another word. Later he would remember the conversation more sharply than the humiliation of the video, because it was the moment he decided he did not want to spend the remainder of his career blaming a boy for a lesson he had needed.
Curtis Wade did not approach. He stood by his truck, watching his name appear in comments on an increasingly popular livestream, already imagining how strangers would compare his eight-thousand-dollar estimate with a repair completed in less than five minutes. His first reaction was defensive. He had been asked to diagnose a modified engine with insufficient records and in an atmosphere of threats; those facts were true, but they did not make his unverified recommendation sound. He drove away before he found the courage to admit the difference.