On the second day, he tried walking toward a small diner off the highway. The place was called Mae's Highway Kitchen, a narrow building with six booths, a faded blue sign, and a television that played the local news with the sound turned down. Leo knew the staff had noticed him before, and the knowledge made it difficult to open the door. He waited until there were few customers, then stepped inside and asked whether they needed dishes washed in exchange for a meal.
The woman behind the counter was Mae Ortega, who had managed the place for twenty-one years and had learned not to mistake pride for ingratitude. She looked at his thin face, the way he kept one arm close to his injured side, and the dried blood beneath his fingernails. She set a bowl of soup in front of him without asking for an explanation in front of the other customers. He ate too quickly, stopped when she told him gently to slow down, and drank the water she brought until his hands stopped trembling.
"You staying out at the old station?" Mae asked when he finished. Leo stared at the spoon. "Somebody saw you walking back that way last week," she continued. "I'm not asking to get you in trouble. I'm asking because you need a place that's safe."
Leo said he was seventeen and would be eighteen within a year. Mae did not act as though that made the danger smaller. She asked if somebody had hurt him, and he answered with a silence that was more honest than his words had been at the clinic. For a moment her face changed, not into pity but into the careful seriousness of a person realizing that the next question mattered.
"I can call someone who handles situations like this," she said. "A youth advocate in Kingman. She won't come here with a police car unless somebody is in immediate danger." Leo looked toward the door and felt his pulse accelerate. "You wouldn't have to explain everything at once," Mae added. "You can start by telling her your name."
He wanted to say yes. Instead he asked if he could take water with him, and Mae filled his canteen while pretending not to notice the argument taking place on his face. She wrote the advocate's number on a napkin and gave him a sandwich wrapped in paper. When he left, she watched him walk until the heat swallowed his small figure, then went to the back room and made a phone call herself.
Mae did not know that Hank Dawson had already contacted several businesses in the area, claiming a dangerous runaway had stolen from him and might be hiding along the old road. She did not know that a deputy named Carl Higgins had been helping Hank search places where a frightened teenager might find shelter. She knew only that the boy in the gray hoodie looked exhausted and that somebody needed to find him before the desert did.