I think I've earned that much." Rex's jaw tightened. "You haven't earned anything here yet." "My father spent 20 years building something for me and died before he could give it to me," Ethan said and his voice didn't rise, didn't heat up, but it carried something in it that made one of the two men in the doorway shift his weight.
"I've been fixing this machine for two days on no sleep and I found evidence that you've been destroying it for eight years. I think I've earned a conversation." The silence after that had an edge to it that could cut. Rex looked at the partially reassembled engine, then back at Ethan.
"My brother's name was Danny," he said finally. His voice had changed. Something had come down out of it, some defensive structure, and what remained was older and raw and quieter. "He was 24 years old, youngest member this club has ever patched in.
Rode like he was born on a bike, laughed like" He stopped, restarted. "Victor took him on a run in the mountains. This was eight years ago. Victor had been pushing that road for months, a road nobody had ridden dangerous terrain, the kind of thing Victor loved because normal wasn't ever enough for him."
Rex's hands, Ethan noticed, had curled slightly at his sides. Not into fists, just curled. The involuntary physical grammar of old grief. "Danny's bike went off a switchback on the descent.
Victor survived, Danny didn't." "I'm sorry," Ethan said, and he meant it, every word of it. "Victor said it was Danny's error, said he told him to slow down before the switchback, and Danny didn't listen." Rex's voice had gone very flat.
"I believe the opposite. Victor was always pushing everyone around him further than they should go. It was his greatest quality and his worst one at the same time. Danny was 24 years old and Victor was the one he trusted most in this world.
If Victor told him that road was rideable, Danny would have ridden it." He paused. "And Victor never said he was sorry, not once. He gave me the facts of what happened, and he called it an accident, and then he went back to work on this bike like it was any other day."
Ethan was quiet for just a moment. "Did you ever consider that Victor not saying sorry might have been because he genuinely didn't believe he did anything wrong?" "I considered it," Rex said. "I rejected it.
A man who doesn't carry guilt for a death on his watch isn't the kind of man I can respect." "Or," Ethan said carefully, "a man who carries guilt so large he can't speak it out loud looks from the outside exactly like a man who feels nothing." Rex stared at him. "I found something in the blueprint," Ethan said.
He reached into his jacket. Not for the blueprint, for a separate piece of paper, a page he'd torn carefully from his own notebook in the early hours of the morning when he'd been working through the blueprint and found something he hadn't expected to find. He held it out. Rex didn't take it immediately.