The little girl had crept in from the doorway and was now standing just behind her brother's left shoulder, gripping the back hem of his jacket with both fists. And then Grim looked up.
His eyes were the color of a winter sky, pale, flat, and utterly without warmth. He looked at the boy the way a mountain looks at weather, unmoved, patient, waiting for whatever this was to either explain itself or go away.
The boy swallowed, his throat moved visibly, and then he said in a voice just barely above a whisper, "Sir, can me and my sister eat your leftovers." The diner was so quiet that Danielle, standing behind the counter with a coffee pot in her hand, later said she heard the rain hitting the window on the far side of the room.
The trucker at the counter set down his fork.
The retired couple looked at each other. Even the college kids stopped mid-sentence because what that boy had just done walking up to Victor Hayes and asking for food was either the bravest thing anyone in that building had ever witnessed or the most catastrophically unaware.
And in that specific corner of Arizona on that specific rainy Friday night, nobody in the room could tell which one it was. Grim looked at the boy for a long moment.
Then he looked at the little girl. She was still shaking and she hadn't let go of her brother's jacket.
Something moved behind Grim's eyes. It was so brief, so quickly suppressed that only Millie, who was watching from the kitchen doorway with her hand pressed flat against the door frame, actually caught it.
Then Grim set down his knife and fork. He pushed the untouched plate, the second plate, the plate that had never in all the years it had been ordered been touched by anyone.
He pushed it across the table toward the boy, and he said, "Leftovers are for dogs. Sit down and eat like family."
The boy didn't move for a second.
He looked at the plate, then at Grim, then at the plate again. "Both of us," he said.
"I said both of you," Grim said. "Sit before it gets cold."
The boy turned to his sister.
He said quietly, "Rosie, come on." And he helped her into the booth first, sliding in beside her.
And the two of them, this pair of half-drowned, bone-thin children, began to eat with a focused, desperate intensity that made more than one person in that diner look away out of something that felt like shame.
Millie was already moving toward the kitchen. She didn't need to be told.
She put in two more orders without being asked, "Soup, bread, hot chocolate, things that warm you from the inside." She also picked up the phone and held it for a moment before setting it back down because she wasn't sure yet what she was going to need to call.
At the corner booth, Grim sat back and watched the children eat.
He hadn't ordered anything else. He hadn't gotten up.
He just sat there with his arms crossed and his expression unreadable. And he watched and something about the set of his jaw and the stillness of his hands suggested that whatever calculations were happening behind those flat gray eyes, they were the kind that didn't end with someone simply driving home.
The boy, Ethan, his name would turn out to be Ethan Cole, 12 years old, from a trailer outside of Wikieup, ate with one hand, and kept his other arm around his sister's shoulders. Even while chewing, even while hungry enough to make the food disappear at a speed that would have been almost comical under different circumstances, he kept that arm around her, kept her close, kept himself positioned between her and the rest of the room.
Grim noticed this. He noticed the way Ethan's eyes tracked the door every time it moved.
He noticed the older bruising on the boy's left forearm, yellowish green, the kind that comes from a grip, fingers pressing hard into flesh. And he noticed the way Rosie held her spoon in her right hand, but didn't extend her left arm fully, keeping it slightly curled against her side the way you do when something hurts.
He noticed all of it, and he sat quietly and let them eat. It was Millie who first tried to gently draw information out of the boy, crouching beside the table with her coffee pot and asking in her most practiced grandmotherly tone whether there was someone she could call a parent, a family member.
Ethan looked at her. He had his mother's hazel eyes, clear, the kind of eyes that see more than they let on.