She nodded, and we stood there in the parking lot while the room emptied out behind us, and for the first time in months, the street felt like a neighborhood again.
The request came through Aaron: Tyler's attorney wanted a meeting. Not a deposition, not a statement — a meeting. I wasn't required to attend. Aaron said that twice, like he wanted to make sure I heard it.
"You don't owe him anything," he said.
"I know," I said.
I went anyway. Aaron had said I didn't owe him anything, and he was right. But I needed to look at Tyler without the sunglasses and the sneer — to see what was left when the performance stopped. Some questions don't get answered in police reports.
The attorney's office was in Raleigh, in one of those buildings with too much glass and a receptionist who offered me water like it was part of a ceremony. Tyler was already there when I walked in, sitting at the far end of a conference table. No sunglasses. No designer jacket. No expensive sneakers — just plain shoes, plain shirt. He looked younger than twenty-four. He looked like what he was: a kid who'd run out of places to stand.
The attorney did the introductions and then, to my surprise, left us alone. "Five minutes," he said. "Off the record."
The door closed. Tyler stared at the table.
"I didn't steal those cars," he said.
"I just moved them."
I waited. He looked up, and his eyes were red.
"I owed people money," he said. "A lot of money. They told me if I didn't help, they'd hurt my mother."
I believed he was afraid. I want to be honest about that — sitting across from him, watching his hands shake on the table, I believed the fear was real. Whether everything around the fear was true, I couldn't decide. Fear is easy to perform and easy to feel at the same time. Those things aren't opposites.
"Why my driveway?" I asked.
He almost smiled. Almost. "Because you were predictable."
"Say more."
"You worked the same hours every day. Your garage was always busy — customers, deliveries, the tow truck. Nobody questioned cars coming and going at a mechanic's shop." He swallowed, and the sound was loud in the quiet room. "It was perfect. A car sits there for a few hours, it looks like it's waiting for repair. Nobody looks twice."
"And when I complained?"
"You became a problem." He said it flat, like a fact he'd rehearsed. Then, quieter: "Your mother made me the problem."
"I know," he said.
"I'm sorry," he said.
The words hung there. I looked at him — really looked — and I tried to see the kid who'd leaned against that Mercedes with his earbuds in and told me to relax. He was gone. What's left when the props come off is always smaller than you expected.
"I thought you were just arrogant," I said. "That would have been easier. Arrogance, I understand — I've met arrogant men in my shop every week for eighteen years. But you weren't just arrogant. You were willing to make innocent people feel crazy so you could hide what you were doing. Evelyn Carter paid your mother twenty-four hundred dollars because she thought she was alone. Do you understand that?"
He nodded, staring at the table again.
"That's what you have to fix," I said. "Not the cars. The cars are gone — impounded, returned, whatever happens to them happens. But you made people doubt themselves. You made a seventy-two-year-old woman think she was the only one, and she paid for that belief. That's the damage. And no plea agreement fixes it. Only you do."
"How?" he said. His voice cracked on the word.
"I don't know," I said honestly. "But it starts with not doing it again. And it continues with every choice after that."
The attorney knocked and came back in. Five minutes, exactly. Tyler stood up, and for a second I thought he might say something else, but he just nodded — once — and walked out with his attorney, and I sat there alone at the conference table with the glass walls and the untouched glass of water.
Driving home, I thought about what he'd said: because you were predictable. My father had taught me to keep regular hours, to run the shop like a machine, to be reliable. And reliability had become a vulnerability — something men I'd never met had studied and used. There was a lesson in that, but it wasn't the one they wanted. The lesson wasn't to become unpredictable. The lesson was that being decent and being watchful aren't opposites. You can keep the same hours and still keep your eyes open. You can be predictable to your customers and a problem to anyone who mistakes your routine for an opportunity.