He picked the phone back up.
He typed: This is Dominic Hayes. I'll be at the Petro in Van Horn on Thursday around 2 pm. Come alone.
He looked at the last two words. Then he deleted them and typed instead: Bring your friends if you want. Doesn't matter to me.
He sent it.
The reply came in less than thirty seconds.
I'll be there. Thank you, sir.
* * *
Van Horn, Texas, is the kind of town you drive through without noticing you were ever in it. It sits on Interstate 10 a hundred and twenty miles east of El Paso, surrounded on every side by brown mountains and empty desert, with a population of about two thousand people and roughly as many motel rooms. Its economy depends almost entirely on travelers who need gas, food, or sleep and have no other options for a very long way in either direction.
The Petro truck stop sat on the east end of town, a sprawling complex of fuel islands, a convenience store the size of a grocery store, a sit-down restaurant, a tire shop, and a parking lot big enough to hold two hundred rigs.
Dominic got there early.
He always got places early. It was another habit he had never been able to shake. He parked his truck at the far end of the lot, where he could see the entrance from the highway, and he walked over to the restaurant and took a booth by the window. Back to the wall. Eyes on the door.
He ordered coffee. Black.
At 1:52, a silver pickup truck pulled into the lot and parked near the restaurant. Damien Cole climbed out of the driver's side.
He was alone.
Dominic watched him through the window. The young man looked different than he had in the diner. He was wearing a plain gray hooded sweatshirt instead of the Ironclad compression shirt, and jeans, and a pair of ordinary sneakers. No gym bag. He stood beside his truck for a long moment, looking at the restaurant, and Dominic could see him take a deep breath, the way fighters do in the tunnel before they walk out to the cage.
Then he squared his shoulders and walked inside.
He saw Dominic right away. He stopped just inside the door. A waitress started toward him with a menu and then, seeing something in his face, veered off toward another table.
Damien walked over to the booth.
He did not sit down. He stood beside the table with his hands at his sides, the same way he had stood over the booth at O'Malley's, but everything about him was different now. He was not looming. He was not grinning. He looked, Dominic thought, like a kid who had been called to the principal's office and had already decided to confess.
"Mr. Hayes," Damien said.
"Damien."
"Thank you for meeting me."
"Sit down if you want."
Damien sat. He kept his hands on the table, flat, where Dominic could see them. Dominic noticed this and said nothing about it.
The waitress came by. Damien ordered a coffee too, and then, after a moment's hesitation, a slice of apple pie. When she left, neither of them said anything for a while.
Finally, Damien looked up.
"I'm sorry," he said.
He said it plainly, without any decoration, and it was clear from the way his voice wavered on the second word that it had cost him something.
"I'm sorry I spilled the coffee on you," he went on. "I'm sorry I didn't apologize when it happened. I'm sorry for what I said. I'm sorry I blocked the door. I'm sorry I put my hands on you. I'm sorry I told you it wouldn't hurt." He swallowed. "You gave me a lot of chances to stop. I counted them, watching the video. Five. You gave me five chances, and I didn't take any of them. I'm sorry for that most of all."
Dominic studied him across the table.
"Why?" he asked.
Damien blinked. "Why what?"
"Why are you sorry? Is it because it went bad for you? Because you lost your sponsor and people are laughing at you on the internet? Or is it something else?"
It was a hard question, and Dominic asked it without any hostility, the way you might ask a patient where it hurts. Damien took a while to answer. When he did, he answered honestly, which surprised them both.
"At first, it was the first thing," he said. "I'm not going to lie to you. The first couple of days, all I could think about was how bad I looked. How everybody was laughing. How I was going to lose my contract. I was angry. I was mostly angry at you, to be honest. I thought, who does this guy think he is?"
Dominic nodded slowly.
"And then I watched the whole video," Damien continued. "The long one. And I watched you sitting there before anything happened. Just reading your book. And I watched myself walk in and throw that bag without even looking. And I watched your face when you looked at me. You weren't mad. You were just waiting for me to say sorry. And I didn't. And I asked myself why not, and I didn't like the answer."
"What was the answer?"
Damien looked down at his hands.
"Because my dad taught me that men who say sorry are weak," he said. "And I've spent my whole life trying to prove I'm not weak. And I think maybe I've gotten so good at not being weak that I forgot how to be a decent person."
The pie arrived. Neither of them touched it.
Dominic sat back in the booth.
"That's a good answer," he said. "That's an honest one. I appreciate it." He picked up his coffee, took a sip, and set it back down. "I accept your apology, Damien. For what it's worth, I didn't need it. I wasn't holding onto anything. But I can see you needed to give it, and I'm glad you did."
Something in Damien's shoulders loosened. He let out a long breath.
"Thank you," he said.
"Now. You drove three hundred miles to say that. You could have said it in a text. What else do you want?"
Damien almost smiled. "How'd you know there was something else?"
"Because you've been sitting on the edge of that seat since you walked in. And you keep looking at my hands."