Silas saw him in the doorway and set down the ledger he had been reading. "Reyes called," he said. Nolan nodded and sat across from him.
"I'm going tomorrow. Before daylight." Silas asked whether he wanted company. Nolan considered the offer and imagined arriving at an unfamiliar garage with ten motorcycles behind him.
"No," he said. "Whatever happens when I see him, I need it to begin with just the two of us." Silas accepted the answer. He did not mistake being excluded from the first meeting for being unwanted afterward.
They talked about what might follow. The investigative referrals were proceeding, and several families named in the papers had already agreed to discuss their cases with attorneys. Pauline had found signs of similar transactions beyond the original seven households, though she was careful not to declare them fraudulent until the records were checked. Garrett Cole had offered a formal statement about the old false entries and his contact with Pike. Sandra Reeves was preparing a series that would place the property transactions beside the human accounts, not merely report that a biker had returned from hiding. Nolan agreed to help people understand their files when he came back.
"You should know one more thing before you go," Silas said. The room around them had grown quieter as the card game ended. "I failed your father. I kept this club together after he disappeared, but I didn't look hard enough for the reason he had to disappear."
"I had suspicions about Cole, and I let myself call them uncertainty because uncertainty required less of me than action would have." Nolan looked at him carefully. The older man's confession sounded neither rehearsed nor designed to obtain forgiveness. It was an accounting.
"You weren't the man who threatened my family," Nolan said. "And you weren't the one who altered the books." Silas shook his head.
"That doesn't make me blameless." "I know," Nolan answered. "But I think Elias knew what he was asking of you. He told you not to let the disappearance destroy what you built."
"Maybe that wasn't permission to stop looking. Maybe it was a request to keep something alive until the truth had a place to come home to." Silas stared at him for a long moment. "You're better at that than you know," he said.
Reyes approached with two paper cups of coffee. He placed one before Nolan, one before Silas, and lowered himself into the chair beside them. "Elias used to say an honest man can be wrong," the old biker said. "A dishonest one insists he never is."
"He'd have a few hard things to say to us, if he's still anything like the Elias I knew." Silas nodded. "I hope he does." Nolan looked at the photographs on the clubhouse wall and found himself imagining his father among these older faces, not as a missing hero but as a man who might have aged into ordinary complaints about engines and the price of coffee.