Rhett had received an accident report four years earlier stating that Caleb had died in a single-vehicle crash on a straight stretch of county highway. The report also said that Caleb's young son had been lost in the aftermath of the same incident, though the circumstances had never been clearly explained. Caleb's wife, Norah, had disappeared before the crash, leaving no current address and no missing-person entry that Rhett could find. The official story was a collection of closed doors, and Rhett had spent six months pushing against them before grief and institutional indifference forced him to stop.
Now a child with Caleb's face was standing in front of him, alive, cold, and asking about a watch. Rhett pushed back his chair, slowly enough not to frighten him. "You came a long way," he said. Eli nodded, but did not lower the red notebook. "Then let's get you dry before we talk about anything else."
Mara Ellis, who handled the club's workshop and most of its practical emergencies, found a clean sweatshirt and sweatpants in a storage cabinet. She was thirty-six, compact and watchful, a former military mechanic whose precise hands were capable of rebuilding an engine or preparing a meal without wasting motion. She put the clothes on a chair near the hallway and explained where the bathroom was, leaving the boy enough privacy to change without feeling surrounded. No one asked him to surrender the notebook, and he kept it inside the borrowed sweatshirt even while pulling up the oversized sleeves.
Deak warmed a bowl of vegetable soup and set down two pieces of bread. Eli looked at the food for a moment before reaching for his spoon, and the speed with which he ate told them more about his recent life than any answer would have. He seemed embarrassed when he noticed Mara watching, so she turned deliberately toward the kitchen counter and found something else to do. Rhett hated that small calculation, the need for a child to protect his dignity while trying not to appear hungry.
"Nobody's going to take that bowl away," Deak said, not unkindly. Eli paused with the spoon halfway to his mouth. "I wasn't worried," he replied. Deak let the obvious lie pass and placed a second piece of bread within reach. The gesture was simple, and that made it one of the first things Eli could accept without suspicion.
Rhett sat opposite him while Jace Holloway moved quietly closer from his monitoring desk. Jace was twenty-eight, thin, permanently undercaffeinated despite the three cups usually within arm's reach, and responsible for managing the club's records, work orders, and security systems. He had a habit of talking too quickly when excited and hardly at all when something truly troubled him. The red notebook interested him, but the boy's guarded expression made him wait.