"I don't know, kid. Maybe start by finding the guy and saying the thing you didn't say in the diner."
* * *
At the gym, things were quieter than Damien expected.
He had been dreading walking in on Tuesday night for the six o'clock class. He had imagined people laughing behind his back, or worse, laughing to his face. He had imagined his own students looking at him differently.
What he had not imagined was the silence.
Nobody said anything about the video. Not one person. The adult kickboxing class warmed up the way they always did. The kids in the youth jiu-jitsu program bowed onto the mat the way they always did. His assistant coaches went through the drills he had written up on the whiteboard. Everyone was carefully, painfully normal.
And somehow that was worse than laughing. Because it meant they had all seen it, and they had all decided, independently, to pretend they hadn't. The way you pretend not to notice when somebody at a party has spinach in their teeth, or when somebody's father shows up drunk to a school play.
They were embarrassed for him.
Halfway through the youth class, a nine-year-old girl named Lily, who had been training with him for two years and who had a gap in her front teeth and an absolutely terrifying guillotine choke, raised her hand.
"Coach Damien?"
"Yeah, Lily."
"How did the old man do that move?"
The room went still. One of the assistant coaches made a small strangled sound. Lily's mother, sitting on the bench by the wall, put a hand over her eyes.
Damien looked at the little girl. She wasn't being mean. She wasn't even trying to be funny. She was nine, and she loved jiu-jitsu more than anything else in the world, and she had seen somebody do something she didn't understand, and she wanted to know how it worked.
He opened his mouth to make a joke, the way he always did, to deflect and swagger and move on.
Instead he heard himself say, "I don't know, Lily. I honestly don't know."
She thought about this seriously.
"Are you going to find out?"
Damien looked around the room, at the twenty kids on the mat staring up at him, at the parents on the bench, at the assistant coaches who couldn't quite meet his eyes.
"Yeah," he said. "I think I have to."
* * *
That night, he sat in his truck in the gym parking lot and watched the video again.
Not the cut-down version with the captions and the sad violin. The full version. The original. Brad had finally sent it to him, along with a long, miserable text full of apologies that Damien hadn't read yet.
He watched all four minutes. He watched the old man sitting with his book and his coffee before anything happened, so still that at first Damien thought the video had frozen. He watched the bag hit the mug. He watched the old man hold the towel to his arm and look up at the counter, and for the first time Damien saw the expression on his face clearly.
It wasn't anger.
It was patience. The old man had been waiting for him to apologize. Had been giving him room to do it. Had kept giving him room, over and over, through every insult and every step closer, right up until the moment Damien's arm went around his neck.
He had offered Damien at least five chances to walk away.
Damien had turned down every single one.
He paused the video on the last frame, the old man stepping out through the door into the rain, and zoomed in on the parking lot behind him. It was blurry, smeared with water and neon. But you could just make out the shape of a truck parked beyond the lights. A dark cab-over Peterbilt with a white trailer. And on the door of the cab, partially lit by the sign, there was a small logo: a circle with a stylized mountain inside it, and some lettering underneath that the camera couldn't resolve.
Damien stared at it for a long time.
Then he opened his browser and started searching for trucking companies with mountain logos.
* * *
Dominic did not find out about the video until Thursday.
He did not use social media. He owned a smartphone because his dispatcher required it and because Grace had insisted, but the only apps on it were for maps, weather, logbooks, and a solitaire game he played at rest stops. He did not watch the news unless it happened to be on a television in a truck stop while he waited for his food. He had delivered the irrigation pipe in Las Cruces on Wednesday morning, picked up a load of pecans bound for Phoenix, and spent most of Wednesday and Thursday rolling through empty desert under a sky so wide and blue that it made Tuesday night seem like something that had happened to somebody else.
Then, Thursday afternoon, somewhere east of Tucson, his phone rang.
The number had a North Carolina area code. He didn't recognize it. He almost let it go to voicemail.
Something made him pick up.
"Hayes."
There was a pause on the other end. Then a voice he had not heard in four years said, "Dom. You stubborn old son of a gun. What in God's name have you been doing out there?"
Dominic smiled despite himself.
"Marcus."
Marcus Reyes had been his team sergeant for three deployments and his friend for twenty-six years. They had gone through selection in the same class. They had carried each other, more than once, in the most literal sense. Marcus had retired two years before Dominic and taken a job running security for a hospital system in Charlotte, and he had stood beside Dominic at Elena's funeral without saying a single word for the entire service, which had been exactly what Dominic needed.
After that, Dominic had drifted. He drifted from everybody. Marcus had called every few months for the first couple of years, and Dominic had answered sometimes and sometimes not, and eventually the calls had come less often. It wasn't anybody's fault. It was just what happened.
"I'm on the road," Dominic said. "Hauling pecans to Phoenix."
"Pecans."
"They're good pecans."
"I bet they are." Marcus's voice had a strange edge to it, half amusement and half something else. "Dom, have you been on the internet at all this week?"
"You know I haven't."