It’s for her and Vance.

And the baby.”

He was quiet for a long moment, turning his coffee cup in its saucer, and I let him have the quiet, because I knew that particular silence from the inside.

It is the silence of a person subtracting themselves from a future they had been living inside — realizing that the house they thought they were moving into was never going to have them in it, that they had been paying, in money and in double shifts and in a sold motorcycle, for a life designed to exclude them.

I had done that subtraction in a parking garage.

He was doing it in a diner.