He did not notice that, at some point during the evening, a message from an unfamiliar number had slid onto his screen. It was a text from his younger brother, the one with the large online following, who had apparently seen the video on Tom's cloud storage during a family photo-sharing mix-up.

Dude. WHAT IS THIS. Can I post it??

Tom stared at the screen. He had told his brother nothing, and the clip had been in a shared folder for less than an hour. His thumb hovered over the reply.

Then, with a sinking feeling that felt very much like inevitability, he saw the little green dot beside his brother's name and understood that it was already too late to ask.

Coffee with Eddie

The Blue Heron Diner had stood on the corner of Wexler and Third for fifty-eight years, and in all that time its coffee had never been good. That was part of its charm. It was the kind of coffee that tasted like decision, strong and burnt and unapologetic, and the men who drank it were the sort who did not care to be impressed.

Walter slid into the corner booth at ten past one. His friend was already there, hunched over a mug with a plate of untouched rye toast in front of him.

Eddie Moreno was seventy-nine, built like a fireplug, with a face like a clenched fist and a hearing aid he refused to turn up. He had worked the assembly line at Aurelia for thirty-six years before retiring in 2005. He and Walter had met in 1981, when a faulty fixture on the line had jammed Walter's thumb in a press, and Eddie, a large young man with a broken front tooth, had pulled it free and told him, Next time, ask a guy who knows what he's doing. They had been friends ever since.

"You look terrible," Eddie said.

"Thank you."

"I mean it with love. Sit. Eat something. You've got the face of a man who's been chewing on a stone."

Walter sat. A waitress with silver hair brought a second mug without being asked. For a while the two men drank in a silence that required no filling. Rain-light shifted on the windows. At the counter, a trucker argued gently with a cook about the Browns.

"So," Eddie said finally. "A car."

Walter told him. He did it plainly, in order, leaving out the adjectives. The showroom. The platform. The curve of the line beneath his fingers. The young man's voice, and the word serious, and the bus shelter. When he finished, Eddie sat for a while with his thick hands wrapped around the mug.

"I'd have broken his nose," Eddie said.

"I know you would."

"Thirty years ago. Maybe fifty."

"Which is exactly why I'm telling you about it now and not then."

Eddie grunted. He took a bite of toast, chewed it, swallowed. "And?"

"And nothing. I left."

"You left?"

"What was I supposed to do? Show him my badge? Tell him my name? Make him feel the way he made me feel?" Walter shook his head. "I've spent my whole life around people who needed to be told how important they were. I got tired of it a long time ago."

"You could've reported him."

"To whom? To the manager, who was probably standing right there? And say what? That an old man touched a car and a salesman raised his voice?" Walter turned the mug slowly on the table. "It's not a crime to be rude, Eddie. It's just a sad thing."

"It's a sad thing that deserves a boot," Eddie said, but there was no heat in it. He looked at his friend with sudden shrewdness. "That's not what's eating you."

Walter said nothing.

"It's the car."

"It's the car." He let out a long breath. "I went in thinking I'd feel something good. I thought I'd see the line and feel Margaret. Eddie, I haven't felt her in so long. Not in the house. Not in the garden. I thought maybe the car would be the place. And for ten seconds, before the boy shouted, I did. Her whole hand was in that curve. I could feel it. And then it was gone, and I stood there in the silence with my hand empty, and I thought: I've lost her twice."

Eddie put down his toast.

For a time he did not speak. The trucker laughed at the counter, a big, easy sound, and the waitress refilled someone's cup, and the rain tapped the glass.

"I never told you this," Eddie said, "but the week after the funeral, I went to your driveway."

Walter looked up.