'You can help a customer without telling them what they want to hear,' she said. 'Sometimes helping is refusing to pretend.'
Leo began to recognize the difference between his old talent for making do and the harder skill of building something reliable. The station had taught him what could be accomplished with almost nothing. The shop taught him what responsibility required when people would place their lives on the machines he repaired.
At twenty, he received a letter forwarded through Rosa. It came from his mother, who had learned where he was after a long stretch of missed addresses and lost messages. The envelope contained an apology that seemed too small for the years between them and a telephone number written in careful handwriting. Leo sat with it for most of an evening before he decided what to do.
He did not call immediately. He had missed her for years, and missing someone had not erased the anger of waiting for promises that never became visits. He showed the letter to Grace, who read it only after he asked her to, and she placed it back in his hands without offering a verdict.
'What would you want from a conversation?' she asked.
'I don't know.'
'Then you don't have to decide tonight.'
A month later, Leo called. The conversation was awkward and quiet, and neither of them had a story capable of repairing the years in a single hour. His mother explained some of what had happened after Patrick's death, including the illness and instability that had made it impossible for her to care for him. Leo listened, asked questions, and told her plainly that he could not pretend the absence had been harmless.
She did not ask him to. That was enough to make another conversation possible. Their relationship remained uncertain, built through occasional calls rather than grand declarations, but for the first time Leo understood that he could choose the pace of a reunion without having to choose between hatred and forgiveness.
The news about Jaden and Mia arrived more steadily. They had been placed in safe homes and were working through the consequences of their time with Hank. Leo spoke with them when their advocates arranged it, then began visiting as circumstances allowed. Mia remembered the exact night he had left and told him she had kept reading his note whenever she feared he had vanished for good.
'I thought if you got somewhere safe, you'd come back for us,' she said during one visit.
Leo looked down. 'I wanted to. I just didn't know how.'
'You did come back,' she told him. 'You told people what happened. They listened.'
He had no answer to that. He knew the riders had found him partly by chance, and that the legal process had required persistence from people more experienced than he was. Yet he had been the one to speak about Jaden and Mia when he was exhausted and frightened, and he had continued speaking after the cameras and motorcycles were gone.