At the center, on the other afternoons, they repaired mats. This was Grace's particular stroke of administration, and none of them missed its shape: the five of them on their knees in the back room, with tape and vinyl patches and a heat gun, mending the torn seams of the room where other people's children learned to fall down safely. Jay repaired like a man defusing something. The fifth of them, a lanky twenty-three-year-old named Theo who had laughed loudest on the day and slept worst since, kept redoing the same corner because, he said, it would be the corner a kid landed on, and it ought to be right.
Kyle held the vinyl flat and thought about the word patch, and how nobody ever put it on a poster.
The apology to Daniel Reyes was Frank's idea, which meant it was not presented as an idea. "Thursday," Frank said, "you will finish the path. Friday, you will go and see the man. I have already asked him if he is willing, because his willingness is the part of this that is his. He said yes, and he said to come in the morning, because afternoons his ankle tells him about the weather." Kyle asked what he was supposed to say, and Frank looked at him with an expression Kyle had come to recognize as the door closing on a whole category of hope. "If I write it," Frank said, "then I will have apologized to Daniel Reyes, and I did not trip him."
Daniel Reyes was thirty-five, an accountant who ran before work because it was the only hour the day had not yet made any claims on, and he received Kyle in a kitchen with a marathon photograph on the refrigerator and an ankle brace folded neatly on the counter like something that had been retired with honors. He did not make it easy and he did not make it hard. He made tea that neither of them drank, and he listened while Kyle, standing because sitting had not been offered and he understood why, said the thing badly and then, on the second try, said it plainly.
"I was showing off," Kyle said. "That is the whole size of it. We came down that path loud, and you were just running, and when Tomas stepped in I made it bigger because there were people watching and I did not know how to make it smaller. Your ankle was not an accident that happened near me. I am sorry. I have fixed the ridge. That is not the same thing, I know that. It is just the part I could do with my hands."
Daniel Reyes looked at him for a long moment with an expression Kyle could not file under any of the ones he had rehearsed in the truck. "I missed nine weeks of running," he said. "I missed the October race I had trained for since March. My daughter asked me why a grown man would do that and I did not have an answer I was proud of." He turned the untouched tea in its place, a quarter turn, the gesture of a man arranging a fact. "You have just given me a better answer than the one I had. It is not a good answer. It is a better one. I accept your apology, Kyle. Do not make me regret being the kind of man who accepts them."
"No, sir," Kyle said, and then, because Frank had trained more than his hips in three weeks, he did not fill the silence with the grin. He stood in it. Daniel Reyes stood too, and tested the ankle with his weight the way he must have done a hundred times in that kitchen, deciding whether the day could be trusted.
"Run your race," Kyle said at the door, awkwardly, "when it comes. The October one. Next time it comes."
"It is a yearly race," Daniel Reyes said, and something moved at the corner of his mouth that was not forgiveness and was not its opposite either. "That is rather the point of it. It comes back. See that you do."
Pete deleted the clip account on a Tuesday, in the center's back room, during a water break, without announcing it, which everyone who knew Pete understood to be the loudest announcement he had ever made. The account had had his whole life on it in one form or another and a following with a number attached that he used to check the way other men checked the weather. Deacon watched the little confirmation box sit on the screen and said, "You sure? You cannot get the name back."