Rex looked down through the office window at the men working on James's old motorcycle. "I think I am."
"That's not quite the same as being ready."
"No. But I'm willing to find out what ready means."
They talked for another twenty minutes. By the end, Rex had agreed to let the agency inspect his apartment and to provide every record requested, including information about the garage and the people who spent time there. Javier advised him to be entirely candid about Thunderfork's past rather than hoping someone might overlook it. Rex accepted that too; a home built on carefully selected truth would not be much of a home.
After the call, he remained in his chair staring at the cracked photograph of James and Sarah. He remembered the day James had announced he was leaving the club, standing in the doorway with a bag of tools in one hand and a list of names he wanted removed from the garage keys. Rex had accused him of thinking he was better than the rest of them. James had answered that he did not think that at all, but he had a daughter who deserved the chance to become better than the mistakes around her.
"You'll come back," Rex had said then. "People don't just walk away from family."
James had looked at him sadly. "Sometimes they walk away because of family."
Rex had carried that sentence like an insult for twenty years. Tonight it sounded like a warning he had failed to hear. He opened the drawer and took out the letter again, reading the line about not making Brian inherit their pride. Then he placed it inside a fresh envelope and wrote Brian's name on the front, deciding the boy should have it whenever he wanted to read it again.
Downstairs the mechanics continued. Their work was methodical rather than dramatic, a sequence of verification, correction, and quiet disagreement. Nobody declared victory when they found the likely cause of the failed start. Butcher insisted on completing all the necessary checks, including those unrelated to the earlier mistake, because a bike that ran for ten seconds and then failed on a road could hurt somebody.
At ten, Crow ordered dinner from a diner that stayed open late for truck drivers. The food arrived in paper boxes, and the men sat around the main workbench eating burgers while the engine cooled. Someone asked whether the boy had ever been camping, and nobody knew. Someone else wondered what school subjects he struggled with, and Rex admitted he had not thought to ask. Their conversation slowly moved away from the motorcycle and toward the person who had brought it back into their lives.
"He likes stars," Millie said when she returned from another call.
Butcher looked at her. "What kind of stars?"
"The ones in the sky, Raymond. Not celebrities."
Butcher scowled at the use of his given name, which made the others grin. "We should take him out somewhere dark enough to see them," Crow said. "My brother's got a field near the lake. On a clear night you can see the whole sky."
"First he needs a bed and a place to do homework," Millie replied. "We can plan the stars after that."