Her father had once told her she was the most stubborn person he had ever met. At the time she had been proud of it. Looking at herself that night, Sarah wondered whether stubbornness was courage or simply another habit that could become dangerous when nobody was left to question it.
Downstairs, a door clicked. She stepped to the window and saw Wyatt walking toward the edge of the parking lot, where a distant light moved along the highway. He did not go beyond the diner sign. He stood there listening until the light passed, then turned back toward the building.
Sarah left the curtain slightly open. She put her phone beside the bed, close enough to reach without thinking. For the first time in many years, she slept with the bedroom door closed.
By six the following morning, the diner smelled of bacon and burned toast, and Sarah was trying to persuade herself that ordinary work could still organize an ordinary day. She had a stack of invoices beside the register and a radiator waiting on the repair bench. The old wall clock ticked toward seven while the sky lightened over the eastern mountains. Outside, the salvage yard looked exactly as it had looked two days earlier, which seemed almost offensive after what had happened.
Wyatt appeared at the kitchen doorway wearing a clean gray T-shirt instead of his leather vest. Without the patch, his height and scars remained intimidating, but he looked less like a warning sign and more like a tired man who had slept badly. He asked for coffee and then offered to repair a loose hinge on the back screen door. Sarah handed him a screwdriver and pointed toward the workshop, watching how carefully he accepted the assignment.
There was a kind of intimacy in trusting somebody with a simple repair. Sarah had grown up among men who spoke far more comfortably through tools than through apologies. Wyatt removed the hinge, inspected the worn screw holes, and took his time making a sound repair instead of forcing the old hardware back into place. When he finished, he opened and closed the door three times to confirm that it moved smoothly.
"Better?" he asked.
"Yes," Sarah said. "My father spent years threatening to do that."
"Why didn't you?"
"Because I inherited his bad habit of fixing everybody else's problems first."
Wyatt looked at the door as though he understood that admission better than she intended. He set the screwdriver down and went back to his coffee. Sarah noticed that he had not asked her to thank him, which was a small relief.
At eight fifteen, a battered pickup pulled into the lot, and an elderly man climbed out carrying a paper bag from the bakery in town. Noel Pritchard was seventy-three, had been a friend of Martin's since their military service years, and still drove the same truck he had owned when Sarah was in elementary school. He wore a blue mechanic's cap with an oil company logo that no longer existed. He took one look at Wyatt and raised an eyebrow.
"You picking up stray dogs now?" Noel asked Sarah.
"Only the ones that can repair hinges."
"Then he's worth feeding."