Nolan leaned back. "You know things about me, though. The investigator had a photograph. She said you were checking on Pike. Did you check on us, too?"
"I did. When I could. I knew which school you went to. I knew you were working at a garage. I knew Carla was raising you in the city. I never came close enough to risk somebody noticing."
"But you came close enough to see."
Elias's face tightened. "Twice. I drove into your city when you were twelve, and again when you were nineteen. Both times I stopped where I could see the street. Both times I thought about getting out."
"And you didn't."
"No."
Nolan felt anger flare again. He had spent years longing for a father who might have been a few blocks away, looking at the same streets and deciding not to turn a steering wheel in his direction. Knowing there had been a threat didn't make every part of that decision easy to forgive.
"You knew she was working two jobs," Nolan said. "You knew we moved every time the rent went up. You knew I spent years thinking I'd done something wrong to make you leave."
Elias sat very still. "I didn't know you blamed yourself."
"You should have guessed. That's what kids do when a parent disappears. They look for the reason in themselves because nobody gives them anything else."
The older man looked at his hands. "You're right," he said. "There are things I chose because I was afraid for your safety, and there are things I kept choosing later because I had lived with the fear so long I no longer knew how to step out of it. I can't make those choices all noble. Some of them were cowardice."
Nolan had not expected the admission. He had prepared for a man defending himself behind the word sacrifice, and he found instead a man willing to say that the same decision could begin in courage and harden into avoidance. The honesty did not erase the years, but it gave Nolan something he could answer.
"I needed you," he said. "More than once. There were times Mom needed you, too."
Elias nodded. "I know. And I wasn't there."
They talked about the early years first. Elias remembered Carla singing softly while she washed dishes, the way she put cinnamon into pancake batter, and the stubborn pleasure she took in proving an inexpensive tool could do a job as well as an expensive one. He remembered Nolan falling asleep beside him on a couch after an afternoon spent watching motorcycle repairs from a safe distance.
"You were fascinated by the sound," Elias said. "Other children got frightened when a motorcycle started. You laughed. I used to give you a little wooden wrench your mother made from scrap and tell you to fix the engine while I checked the tires."
Nolan tried to remember the wooden wrench. He had a vague memory of a yellow-painted shape, perhaps something from a different toy entirely. It frustrated him that his father's memories seemed so vivid while his own had vanished into the dark before he could hold them.
"I remember a smell," he said eventually. "Oil and leather. Not much more. Sometimes I thought I invented it because I needed something to remember."