The silver lighter lay between them.
She was crying quietly.
Toby sat across from her.
“Are you mad at me?” he asked.
Sarah wiped her face. “For going to that bar? Yes.”
He looked down.
“For finding the box? No.”
“For making Uncle Silas come here?”
Sarah stared at the lighter.
“I do not know yet.”
Toby nodded. That was more honest than most adult answers.
After a moment, he asked, “Did Dad ever regret leaving them?”
Sarah took a long breath.
“Every day.”
Toby's eyebrows rose.
“He regretted hurting Silas. He regretted making his friends think he was dead. He regretted not being able to tell them he was alive.”
“Then why did he stay gone?”
Sarah looked at him.
“Because regret and wrong are not always the same thing.”
Toby thought of what Silas had said: people were inconvenient that way.
Sarah touched the lighter with one finger.
“He believed staying gone was the only way to keep the life he had chosen from contaminating the life he was trying to build.”
“Did it work?”
“For six years.”
“That is not very long.”
“No.” Sarah's eyes filled again. “But it gave me you.”
Toby slid his hand across the table until it covered hers.
The oxygen machine sighed in the living room.
Neither of them spoke for a long time.
The next morning began before sunrise at the Rusty Anchor.
Silas had slept for less than two hours on the narrow couch in his office, though sleep was not the right word for what happened. He closed his eyes and moved through memories. Elias teaching him to gap spark plugs. Elias stealing the blankets when they shared a room as teenagers. Elias standing in a doorway in July 1973, saying he was going out and not answering where.
At 5:40 a.m., Silas gave up pretending to rest.
He made coffee in the bar kitchen and sat alone beneath Elias's photograph. The club was almost peaceful at that hour. Without music, voices, and engines, the Rusty Anchor revealed its age: old pipes ticking in the walls, a refrigerator cycling behind the bar, wind pressing faintly against a loose window frame.
Silas took the custom silver lighter from memory and found his hand empty.
For fifteen years, he had imagined that if the lighter ever came back, he would finally have something solid to hold while grieving. Instead, he had given it away within hours.
He did not regret it.
At six, Bones came through the back door carrying coffee from a twenty-four-hour diner and a folder from Martin Keene. “Lawyer says the house is fixable.”
Silas looked up.
“The mortgage is technically in Sarah's cousin's name, but she and Elias have receipts going back years. The lender only cares about arrears and legal title transfer. We clear the default, get the cousin to sign the interest over, and put Sarah on record properly.”
“How much?”