"I'm just sorry."
"Okay," Ethan said.
And it was.
Not perfect.
Not magically erased.
But okay.
Ethan didn't need more from Danny than that.
Danny left.
Marcus and Ethan remained in the parking lot.
"What happens now?"
"Now we go back to the garage."
Marcus looked steadily at him.
"And we figure out what comes next for you."
"Tonight?"
"Not tonight. Not tomorrow."
Marcus shook his head.
"What actually comes next."
Ethan waited.
"I've been doing the math," Marcus said. "Engineering background. Couple years of college. 20 years old."
He held Ethan's gaze.
"You're not a finished version of yourself, Ethan. You're nowhere close."
"I know."
"Then stop acting like you are."
It wasn't cruel.
It was direct.
The kind of directness that was itself a form of respect.
The refusal to soften truth until it lost its shape.
"Come on."
They walked back toward the truck.
Phoenix continued around them the way cities always do.
Indifferent.
Relentless.
Completely uninterested in the exact coordinates of a single person's turning point.
But Ethan Walker, 20 years old, crossing a parking lot beside the man who had actually shown up, felt something he hadn't experienced in so long it took him time to identify it.
Not completely safe.
Not saved.
Not fixed.
Just the particular feeling of a day that had started in one direction and turned somewhere else.
The feeling of ground that held.
Ethan filed it away carefully.
The way he filed things that mattered before he fully trusted them.
Then kept walking.
The garage became Ethan's world for the next week and a half.
Nobody formally announced that it would.
Marcus didn't order him to stay.
Gus didn't lock the door behind him.
There was no dramatic declaration.
It happened gradually.
Then all at once.
A collection of small facts adding up to something larger.
Ethan slept on the cot.
Drank Gus's coffee.
Watched the rhythms of the garage.
Kept his mouth mostly shut and his hands available.
Around the third day, Gus handed Ethan a wrench.
No explanation.
Then pointed toward an engine.
Ethan took the wrench.
Did what he could.
What he could do turned out to be considerably more than Gus expected.
"You said you studied engineering."
"Two years."
Gus watched him work.
"You've got more than two years in those hands."
Gus said it flatly.
Without decoration.
Like somebody who had decided words were limited resources and intended to spend them carefully.
Ethan didn't answer.
But he registered it.
Acknowledgment of competence from a man who didn't give acknowledgment casually felt different from praise.
It felt like information.
Marcus stopped at the garage most mornings.
Sometimes for an hour.
Sometimes for 10 minutes.
He and Gus spoke about logistics.
People.
The administrative language of an organization that had operated by its own internal rules long enough that those rules had developed a grammar Ethan didn't completely understand.
Whenever Marcus spoke directly to Ethan, it had purpose.
Marcus didn't make much small talk.
He asked specific questions.