Then she turned around and found Ethan watching her from the booth with that careful, patient, unbearably adult expression. "That was him," the boy said.
It wasn't a question. Yes.
"Is she alive?" The directness of it, the flat practical directness, asking the thing most people would circle around for 10 minutes, hit her like a splash of cold water.
"Yes," Millie said firmly. "Yes, she is.
He's working on getting to her." Ethan nodded.
He looked down at his pie. He took a bite.
He chewed. And then very quietly, so quietly she almost didn't catch it.
He said, "She's been alive every other time, too. And every other time, he brought her back."
Millie pulled a chair over from the nearest empty table and sat down directly across from him.
Not across the booth, but close, the way you sit when you need someone to actually hear you. "Ethan," she said.
"Look at me."
He looked up. "The man who just called me, I have known him for over a decade and I have seen him do things that scared me and I have seen him do things that she paused choosing surprised me in both directions.
She leaned forward slightly. "But I have never, not once, seen him start something he didn't finish, and right now he has decided to finish this."
She held the boy's gaze. "Do you understand what I'm telling you?"
Ethan was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "He lost somebody, didn't he?
That's what the second plate is." Millie sat back.
She thought about what Grim had told her years ago on a slow Tuesday evening when the diner was nearly empty and he'd had two beers and the look on his face that she associated with him being somewhere else entirely in his mind. The way he talked about it, not with self-pity, not with the performance of grief, but with the flat, exhausted honesty of a man who had gone over the same ground so many times the grass had given up growing.
A son. A fight that got out of hand.
A door that closed and never opened again. Yes, she said simply.
He lost somebody. Ethan absorbed this.
He looked at the second plate still sitting at the edge of the table, pushed aside but not removed because Millie had learned not to take it away before Grim left for the night. "How long ago?"
Ethan said.
"Long time," Millie said. "Does he know where?"
"No," she said softly.
"He doesn't." The boy was quiet for a long moment.
Rosie breathed steadily against his shoulder.