Ethan considered this. What kind of things?
Millie smiled a little without much humor in it. "Eat your pie," Millie said.
He ate. Rosie shifted in her sleep.
Made a small sound. Settled again.
The trucker at the counter had paid his bill, but hadn't left. He was on his third coffee and making no move toward the door, and Millie understood without either of them saying anything about it that he had decided to stay.
The retired couple was the same. The college kids had quietly moved to the booth closest to the window that faced the parking lot and one of them had his phone out and he wasn't scrolling, he was watching.
People were circling the wagons. They didn't even know they were doing it.
Ethan noticed. He noticed everything that was clear.
He looked around the room slowly and then looked back at his plate and something in his face shifted by a fraction of a degree. Some microscopic softening around the eyes that suggested he had registered what was happening and that it meant something to him even if he wasn't going to say so.
"How far did you walk today?" Millie asked.
"We left around 4:00 in the morning," he said.
"Took the service road first so he wouldn't see us on the highway. Then we cut across when it got light in the rain.
It wasn't raining when we left. Started maybe around 7."
Millie did the math quietly.
4:00 In the morning. Desert roads, a 12-year-old carrying his little sister when she got too tired, which she suspected had happened more than once based on the set of the boy's shoulders and the state of his shoes.
"Did you have any food with you when you left?" She asked.
He shook his head.
"I took some crackers from the cabinet. We ate those around noon."
Crackers for 25 miles. Millie put her hand flat on the table and breathed through her nose for a moment.
"Your mom," she said carefully. "She knew you were leaving."
Ethan looked up at her, then full eye contact, and she saw it.
The thing he'd been holding since he walked through the door, the weight he'd been carrying that was too big for a 12-year-old's frame, but was there anyway because nobody else had been available to carry it. "She woke me up at 3:00," he said.
She packed Rosie's bag. She told me which road to take and how far to go before we cut to the highway.
She gave me $9. He stopped.
She said, she said that she had tried everything she knew how to try and she'd run out of ways to do it herself and the only thing she had left was to get us out. His voice was steady, the steadiness of someone who has already cried about this in private and has made themselves stop because there wasn't time.
She said to find someone safe. And you found Grim.