The welcome mat said COME BACK WITH A WARRANT. He stood on it and knocked twice.
Caleb opened the door almost at once, as if he had been standing just on the other side of it. Maybe he had been, for a whole day. He looked terrible. He was thinner than he had been in March, his face hollow under a week of patchy beard, his eyes red-rimmed. He wore gray sweatpants and the same faded Oregon Ducks t-shirt Claire had described. His left hand hung at his side, ungloved, and Daniel looked at it for the first time since the aid station: the thumb, the two fingers and a half, the long pink seam of the graft across the back, the knuckles where the other fingers had been, smooth and shiny, like something melted and set.
Caleb didn't step back. He didn't put up his hands. He stood in the doorway and looked Daniel in the face and then deliberately lowered his chin, the way a man does when he's about to be hit and has decided not to stop it. He said something. He said Daniel could go ahead. He said he wouldn't fight him, and he wouldn't call anybody, and nobody would hear anything about it from him.
Daniel hit the doorframe.