Mara did not tell him to be grateful for the rescue or insist that bad things happened for a reason. She wiped her hands on a rag, sat beside him, and said that wanting a normal summer was a perfectly reasonable thing for a seventeen-year-old to want. Then she told him the shop was closing early on Friday and asked whether he would like to go to a baseball game with her niece and a few friends from Juniper House.
Leo thought about the question for a long time. "Do I have to?"
"No," Mara answered. "That's why I asked."
He said yes. The baseball game was uneventful in all the best ways, with greasy hot dogs, uncomfortable seats, and an argument about whether the visiting pitcher was deliberately walking the home team's best hitter. Nobody demanded that Leo tell his story, and nobody treated him as fragile. He came back to Juniper House tired for reasons that had nothing to do with fear.
Two weeks after his arrival, Sully called to ask how he was doing. Leo told him he was working on a training engine and had signed up for an assessment to finish his school credits. Sully listened, asked one technical question about the engine, and then said he was proud of him. Leo stared at the phone for so long afterward that Serena asked if everything was all right.
"Yeah," he said. "Somebody said something nice. I'm just trying to figure out what to do with it."
Serena smiled without making a joke of the admission. "You don't have to do anything with it right away," she said. "You can just let it be true for a while."
The first time Leo tried to sleep without leaving his shoes beside the bed, he woke in darkness convinced that somebody had moved them. He sat upright so quickly that pain flashed through his healing ribs, then froze, listening to the sounds of the youth residence. Down the hallway a staff member was speaking quietly to another teenager who had had a nightmare. The building settled around them with the ordinary clicks and creaks of a place where people were asleep, but Leo remained rigid until the window began to lighten.
Serena told him that recovering from danger rarely felt like walking through a door and discovering a different world on the other side. More often, she said, the body learned safety long after the mind understood it. She did not ask him to forgive Hank, thank the state, or regard the desert as a valuable lesson. She asked him to notice the moments when he could choose what happened next and to practice trusting those choices.
At the shop, choice was everywhere. Mara allowed Leo to decide whether to begin with cleaning tools or inspecting a training engine, provided he completed both tasks properly. He could ask questions without being mocked, and the answers did not change according to anyone's mood. When a job went badly, she called him over and asked him to show her where his reasoning had gone wrong rather than assigning blame before he could speak.