"You were going to call me the next day," she said. "You texted me that night. I looked at the time stamp. You texted me at 12:41 in the morning, an hour after it happened, and you didn't say anything. You just said 'love you too, kiddo, get some sleep.'"
"I didn't want to worry you."
"Dad." Her voice cracked. "I'm twenty-eight years old. I'm a nurse. I work in an emergency room. I see people bleeding to death every week. You don't have to protect me from things anymore. Mom spent her whole life watching you carry stuff by yourself, and I watched her watching you, and I'm not going to do that. I'm not."
He didn't say anything. He couldn't.
"I'm not mad," she said, more softly. "I'm just—I want to know you. Not the version of you that's always fine. The real one."
Dominic looked out the windshield at the dark desert. The stars were coming out, more of them than seemed possible.
"Okay," he said. His voice came out rough. "Okay, Gracie. Let me tell you what happened."
And for the next forty-five minutes, sitting alone in the cab of his truck in a truck stop parking lot in southern Arizona, he did.
He told her about the storm and the diner and the book. He told her about Sarah and the coffee and the bag. He told her how it felt when the young man's arm went around his neck, how his body had moved before his mind had caught up, how easy it had been and how much he hated that it had been easy. He told her about his hands shaking afterward at the rest stop. He told her about the nights he still didn't sleep, and the dreams, and some of the places he had been, though not all of them. He told her about the tattoo.
He told her about her mother. About how he still set out two coffee cups some mornings before he remembered.
Grace listened to all of it. She didn't interrupt. A couple of times he heard her sniffle.
When he was finished, she said, "Thank you, Dad."
"For what?"
"For letting me in."
They talked a little longer, about smaller things. Her shifts. A doctor she didn't like. A boy she had been seeing who was apparently a very good cook and very bad at returning texts. Before she hung up, she made him promise to come to San Antonio for her birthday in May.
"I'll be there," he said.
"You said that last year."
"I'll be there this year. I promise."
"Okay." A pause. "I love you, Dad."
"Love you too, kiddo."
After the call ended, he sat in the dark for a long time. Then he did something he had not done since the funeral. He opened the photos on his phone and scrolled back, all the way back, to a picture of Elena standing on the back porch in Fayetteville in a yellow sundress, laughing at something off-camera, with Grace, eight years old, hanging on her arm.
He looked at it until the screen went dark.
* * *
The trucking company was called High Mesa Freight, out of Albuquerque.
It took Damien four days to find it. He went through hundreds of logos. Mountains in circles, mountains in triangles, mountains with suns behind them. He enlisted Leon, who turned out to be much better at internet research than Damien had ever given him credit for. It was Leon who finally found it, on a Saturday afternoon, on page eleven of an image search, a small regional carrier with a fleet of about forty trucks and a logo that matched the blurry shape on the door of the cab almost exactly.
Damien called them on Monday morning.
The woman who answered the phone in dispatch was named Rosa, and she had worked at High Mesa for nineteen years, and she had absolutely no intention of telling a stranger anything about any of her drivers.
"I'm sorry, sir, we don't give out that kind of information."
"I just want to talk to him. I'm not trying to cause trouble."
"I'm sure you're not. But we don't give out that kind of information."
"Ma'am, I think you know which driver I'm talking about. I think you've seen the video."
There was a long pause on the other end.
"Sir," Rosa said, in a very different tone of voice, "I've seen the video. Everybody in this building has seen the video. And I'll tell you what I told the three reporters and the man from the television station who called here last week. That driver is one of the finest men I have ever had the privilege of working with. He has never once been late. He has never once complained. He covered Christmas runs for three years straight so the drivers with little kids could be home. And if you think I'm going to tell the man who tried to choke him where he is, you have lost your mind."
Damien closed his eyes.
"I'm not trying to find him to fight him," he said. "I swear to God. I want to apologize."
Silence.
"I didn't apologize," Damien said. "In the diner. I should have. I could have, so many times, and I didn't, and I've been thinking about it every day since. I can't sleep. I don't—" His voice caught. He was embarrassed by it. He kept going anyway. "I just want to tell him I'm sorry. To his face. That's all. If he doesn't want to see me, I get it. But I'd like the chance to ask."
Rosa didn't answer for a long time.
"Give me your phone number," she finally said. "I'll pass it along. What he does with it is up to him."
* * *
Dominic got the message from Rosa on Tuesday afternoon, exactly one week after the storm.
He was in El Paso, sitting in a truck stop diner off Interstate 10 with a plate of enchiladas going cold in front of him, and he read the text three times. Then he set the phone down and ate his enchiladas, slowly, thinking.
He had no particular wish to see Damien Cole again.
He did not feel any anger toward the young man. That had never been the problem. But he had said what he needed to say on the floor of that diner, and he could not see what more there was to add. He was tired of the whole thing. He was tired of strangers looking at him a half-second too long in truck stops, wondering where they had seen him before. Two days ago a teenager at a gas pump in Deming had said, "Hey, aren't you the diner guy?" and Dominic had said "No," and driven away, and felt ashamed of the lie for an hour afterward.
He wanted it to be over.
But he thought about what Marcus had said. You talked to that kid like a coach.
And he thought about what Grace had said. I want to know you. The real one.
And he thought about Earl Watkins, though he did not know that name and never would. He thought about whatever old coach must once have stood in front of that young man, a long time ago, before something had gone wrong, and asked him what he wanted.