Grip's mouth tightened. 'You sure about that?'
'I found something that could have killed you,' Caleb replied. 'You told me you wanted the truth. That means I have to do what keeps the evidence useful, even if it gets uncomfortable.'
Crowley looked at him for a long time. 'Aaron would've liked that answer.'
Caleb felt a familiar ache rise in his throat at the mention of his uncle. He turned away under the pretense of finding an extension cord, unwilling to let the room watch him struggle with emotion. The men around him were suddenly less frightening in certain ways and more complicated in others. He understood that their protection could be valuable, but he also understood that accepting it blindly could become another kind of trap.
At nine forty, Lena arrived despite everything Caleb had told her. She stopped at the edge of the motorcycles in her dusty pickup, leaned out the window, and informed the nearest rider that she was there to make sure her friend was alive. The man pointed toward the shop rather than arguing, and she drove through the narrow opening with her jaw set in determined annoyance. Caleb met her halfway across the gravel.
'You told me not to come,' she said.
'I did.'
'You sounded like a person whose will was about to be read.'
'I'm okay.'
She looked at the marks on his shirt where Grip had grabbed him and then at the wall of motorcycles behind him. 'You have a strange definition of okay.'
Caleb wanted to assure her that everything was solved. Instead, he said only that he had found a dangerous defect, the owner had seen the evidence, and Jonah was helping finish the evaluation. Lena listened while watching the riders beyond the shop. Then she did what she had been doing since Aaron's funeral: she asked whether he had eaten anything and told him to stop acting like being alive was an adequate meal plan.
She brought him a bottle of cold water and a sandwich from the gas station down the road. He ate standing beneath the shop's awning while the warm night pressed against his back. Lena examined the ten-thousand-dollar receipt he had written for Grip, looked up in disbelief, and then made Caleb promise not to spend the money until he had talked to the bank and accounted for taxes, inspection costs, and the business's actual obligations. He found the caution comforting rather than disappointing.
'You don't even look happy,' she said.
'I'm trying to figure out whether this is real.'
'It will still be real after you sleep.'
He nodded. His hands had stopped shaking, but he felt as though he had spent the day carrying something heavier than the engine he had lifted. The ordinary concern in Lena's voice reminded him of a world outside the industrial park, a world where a friend could be angry at him for missing dinner without wondering whether somebody would retaliate. He wanted desperately to return to that world.