"How did you find us?" Rhett asked when Eli had finished eating. Eli wiped his mouth with the napkin Mara had provided, folding it into a small square before putting it beside his bowl. "Dad kept photographs," he said. "There was one of you and him outside this building, and your name was on the back. It took me a while to find the place."
"Where were you before tonight?" Mara asked gently. Eli looked toward the rain-dark window instead of answering. Rhett could see the calculation in his silence: how much information would make these adults helpful, and how much might give them a way to send him somewhere he did not want to go. "Different places," he said finally. "I'm all right."
"You don't look all right," Deak said. The statement might have sounded blunt from anyone else, but his expression held no judgment. Eli shrugged. "Looking all right hasn't been especially useful," he said, and went back to watching Rhett's wrist.
The watch had once belonged to Caleb's grandfather, a railroad mechanic who could diagnose a failing bearing by listening through a length of pipe. Caleb had worn it through most of his adult life, not because it was valuable, but because he believed objects could carry promises as surely as people did. When he gave it to Rhett at a rest stop outside Memphis, his explanation had been uncharacteristically short. "Keep this safe for me," he had said. "Don't lose it, and don't hand it over to anybody who can't tell you why it matters."
Rhett had laughed at the time and accused him of becoming sentimental. Caleb had only adjusted the cuff of his jacket and looked down the highway, his usual humor absent for a moment. Rhett remembered that look now with painful clarity. It belonged to a man who had already begun planning for a future he did not expect to see.
"You know about the watch," Rhett told Eli. "What else do you know?" The boy pulled out the red notebook and laid it on the table, keeping one hand on its cover. The corners had been reinforced with old transparent tape, and the pages had swollen and dried so many times that the notebook no longer closed flat. "I know my dad wasn't killed by a bad engine," he said.
A quiet that was different from the first silence settled over the room. Four years ago, Rhett had said something similar to a county investigator and been told to leave the work to professionals. Caleb was among the best mechanics Rhett had ever known, a man who checked other people's work twice because he understood what an overlooked part could cost. He would not have taken an unsafe motorcycle onto a highway without noticing the warning signs. Yet the report had described mechanical failure with maddening confidence and almost no supporting detail.
Eli opened his notebook. He had filled the pages with dates, vehicle descriptions, rough maps, delivery schedules, and names written in tight columns. Pencil arrows connected several entries; scraps of receipts were taped beside others, and some notes had been written so small that Jace leaned over to read them. The heading on the first page was a name that made Rhett's stomach tighten: VICTOR HALE.