But quietly, I don't need another circus. I've had enough circus for one lifetime this week. Understood, Marlene said, already gathering her things.
Dutch watching the whole exchange finally let out a long breath and rubbed a hand over his face. This week, he said to no one in particular, has been the longest week of my entire life. And I once spent four days in a hospital waiting room after Marcus wrecked his bike outside of Tucson. That was a bad week, too, Marcus admitted. This one's worse, Dutch said.
This one had lawyers. That got a real laugh out of the room. The first easy unguarded laugh anyone had managed since the whole ordeal began four days earlier. And something about it seemed to release a tension that had been sitting in that garage since the moment the Black Phantom first died in front of 3,000 people.
Ethan sat quietly through the laughter, some of the earlier heaviness starting to lift off his shoulders, too. But there was still something turning behind his eyes that made Marcus look at him more closely. What is it? Marcus asked. I keep thinking about that kid, Ethan said.
The one at the feed store and the girl in my class. I keep thinking about how close I came to not being here today at all. He looked up. If Reaper had turned me away at that gate this morning, if Cutter hadn't let me through, none of this happens. Not the fix, not the money, not any of it.
I get back in my truck, drive 2 hours home, and nobody ever finds out any of this was possible. But that's not what happened, Marcus said. No, Ethan agreed. But it could have, and that's exactly the point I'm trying to make about this program.
How many kids out there right now are standing at some kind of gate waiting for somebody to decide whether they're worth letting through? How many of them never get the 60 seconds as I got this morning? Nobody had an answer for that because there wasn't one. not a comfortable one.
Anyway, it was three days later once the legal dust had settled and Marlene had confirmed enough about Precision Dine Technologies' fraudulent timeline that their lawyer quietly withdrew every claim rather than face a counter suit that Marcus called a full meeting of the club to make the announcement official. The clubhouse yard was packed, every member present along with a small handful of people who had in the span of one impossible afternoon become inseparable from the story: Dutch, Sal, Reaper, and Cutter. Even Denise, who'd been invited as a courtesy after the fair and careful way she'd handled the story once the facts came out. Ethan stood beside Marcus at the front, looking somehow both older and younger than he had the week before. The exhaustion of the ordeal still faintly visible under a new kind of quiet confidence.