She wiped the counter. You came from Louisville? Long drive, took it slow. She glanced at Ren, who was applying an unreasonable quantity of butter to her pancakes and hadn’t noticed she was being observed. Your daughter?

She’s starting at Mil Haven High Monday. The woman nodded. Something moved across her face for a half second. Not concern exactly. More like the expression of someone who knows a thing and is deciding whether it belongs to them to share.

She decided it didn’t. Not yet. Biscuits in about 10 minutes. She said, “I’ll bring some over. ” She went back to the counter. Boon watched her go.

He’d spent 37 years learning to read people. Not as a party trick, but as a survival skill that had over time become something quieter and more useful. A way of paying attention to the world. This woman had something behind her eyes. Information held long enough that it had become part of her.

He filed that away and drank his coffee. Ren ate her pancakes and looked out the window at Main Street coming to life. A delivery truck. An old man walking a hound dog who was sniffing everything available to him with absolute dedication. A teenager on a bicycle backpack on moving like he had somewhere to be and wasn’t happy about going there.

Dad. M. Is this the one? He looked at her. She was still watching the street.

The one what? He said, “The one we stay in. ” She said, “It’s simply no drama in it, just the question stripped down to its bones. I need to know if it’s worth unpacking the boxes this time or if I should just keep living out of them. ” Boon set down his coffee cup. He thought about the 14 boxes in the bed of the pickup, mostly Ren’s books. A box of trophies from the gymnastics she’d done until she was 12.

A framed photograph of Callie at the Grand Canyon, her hair blown sideways by the wind, laughing with her whole face, the way she laughed when she forgot she was being looked at. He thought about the three-year lease signed on the Larkin Street garage. He thought about being 59 years old and tired in ways that sleep no longer fixed. “Unpacked the boxes,” he said. Ren looked at him for a long moment.

Something settled in her expression. “Okay,” she said, and went back to her pancakes. The most important conversation they would have that morning. Neither of them made a production of it. The garage sat on Larkin Street, two blocks east of Maine.