Exit sightlines, bodies in motion, bodies standing too still. It wasn’t something he chose to do. It was the same as breathing. Grandpa, they only have mustard left. Caleb turned around. His face caught between disappointment and philosophical resignation. He was a small kid, gap-toothed with his mother’s brown eyes and a sunburn across his nose that was going to hurt by Thursday.
Is mustard okay? I personally don’t like mustard, but I’ll eat it if you want. I like mustard, Owen said. You do? Caleb looked genuinely surprised as if this required full recalibration of his understanding of his grandfather. Get two. Caleb turned back to the cart with renewed purpose.

Owen’s daughter Megan was 14 miles away at Valley General, somewhere in the determined and inconvenient process of delivering her second child. Megan’s husband Drew was with her, useless and devoted in equal measure. Babysitting duty had fallen to Owen by default, a duty he accepted without complaint. He was better with Caleb than most people assumed.
He didn’t have a loud personality or a talent for crafts, but he knew how to pay attention, and children responded well to being genuinely paid attention to. Caleb had been nervous this morning, the way kids get when they understand something important is happening, but aren’t allowed inside the room where it’s happening. Owen had taken him to the park, bought him a snow cone, listened to a 20-minute explanation of a video game he would never play, and said very little.

By lunchtime, Caleb had stopped being nervous. That was Owen’s primary skill set in civilian life, keeping the people he was responsible for from getting hurt by things he saw coming before they did. He just wanted a quiet afternoon. Bryce Colton moved through a crowd the way a plow moves through snow, not navigating it, displacing it.

He was 23 years old, built like a fire hydrant, running on protein powder and residual adrenaline, and approximately 48 hours removed from winning the regional open amateur title at a mid-tier MMA promotion held in a casino ballroom in Henderson. The belt was plastic, the opponents were regional, and the victory was real enough. To Bryce, this was cosmically indistinguishable from a UFC championship.
He had been telling people about it, loudly, constantly, since the referee raised his hand, and he had arrived at Riverside Park today not to enjoy the holiday, but to be witnessed enjoying it. He wore a compression shirt so tight it functioned as a display case for his heavily tattooed arms. His shorts were branded with his gym’s logo, Apex Combat, Henderson, NV, and his sneakers were white and pristine, the aggressively maintained white that communicates priority.