"Neither did I until they told me she wasn't coming home from the hospital," Nolan said. He had not meant the sentence to sound sharp, but it did, and he let it stand. "I was there, though. I was there when it happened."
Elias looked at him through tired eyes. "I'm glad she wasn't alone. I'm sorry you had to be the one to carry it."
Nolan thought of his mother's hospital room, the machine beside the bed, the gentle insistence of nurses who wanted him to sit because he looked close to falling down. He had been angry that Carla was leaving him, then ashamed of being angry at somebody who had no choice in the matter. Now another person had appeared who would carry a different version of that loss.
"Silas is alive," Nolan said after a moment. "So is Reyes. Decker. Boon. The club held."
Elias looked up sharply. The names seemed to pull him away from his grief for a moment, one by one, as though Nolan were opening windows in a house sealed for years. "Silas," he said. "That stubborn old fool."
"He thinks the same about you."
Something like a smile crossed Elias's face and vanished. He looked at the cut again. "He kept the club together?"
"He did. Not perfectly. He says he failed you, but he kept it together. And when I showed up with your photograph, thirty-two men recognized you."
Elias rubbed his eyes. "Thirty-two," he repeated. "We were never good at keeping our gatherings small."
It was the first thing he said that sounded unguarded. Nolan felt the faintest release of tension in his chest, though he did not smile. There was too much unsaid for humor to carry it yet.
Elias stood and wiped his hands on a rag, then set it down as though he had suddenly forgotten why it was in his hand. "There's an office behind the shop," he said. "The coffee machine's broken. I've been meaning to fix it for a month."
"You fix other people's cars and can't fix your own coffee machine?"
Elias looked at him. "Seems that way."
Nolan followed him inside. The office was smaller than expected, with mismatched chairs, a filing cabinet, a desk rubbed smooth at the corners, and a stack of unpaid parts invoices. A calendar hung above a coffee machine with a paper sign reading OUT OF ORDER, written in the same deliberate lettering as the labels on the bins in Harwick Auto Repair. Elias cleared a chair by moving a box of oil filters to the floor. He did not have to ask Nolan to sit; the young man was already looking around, seeing a life reduced to its working essentials. There were no family photographs on the walls and no mementos from the Iron Ravens, but the placement of every tool suggested someone who had spent years trying to avoid leaving a trace he could not explain.
"Daniel Cross," Nolan said, trying out the name.
Elias nodded. "That's what people here know me as."
"Do they know anything about me?"
"No." Elias paused. "They know I used to live somewhere else and don't talk about it much. That has been enough for a small town that mostly cares whether I can get a tractor running before harvest."