He told him he hadn't wrecked anything. He told him that when something is broken, the person who says so isn't the person who broke it. He told him that telling the truth was brave, and that he had been brave on the porch, the bravest soldier Daniel knew. He told him the grown-ups had made some big mistakes, and they were grown-up mistakes, grown-up problems, and they were going to be the ones to fix them, or try to. None of it was his job. He told him that Mom was not going to jail and that nobody was in trouble with the police. He told him he wasn't going back to the war. Not now, not because of anything Owen did, not ever because of anything Owen did.
Claire told him too. She told him through her own tears that it wasn't his fault, that none of it was his fault, that he was the best boy in the world, and that she was sorry. She said she was sorry over and over into his hair. Daniel let her. He found, holding them both, that he didn't begrudge her this at all.
Owen fell asleep there eventually, on the hall floor, his fists still closed around the photograph and the coin. Daniel carried him to bed. He was heavier than he had been when Daniel left. Claire pried his fingers open one by one, gently, and set the photograph and the coin on the nightstand next to the plastic moon. They stood together in the doorway and watched him sleep for a long time without speaking. It was the closest they had been since the porch.
Afterward, in the hallway, Claire asked him whether they should throw away the coin. Daniel looked at it on the nightstand, bronze in the moonlight, the outline of the cargo truck. He thought about the man who had given it, and why, and what it meant to the boy. He said no. He said it was Owen's, and that someday Owen would decide for himself what to do with it, and that it wasn't theirs to throw away.