"Hello?"
Wren opened her mouth and nothing came out.
"Hello? Who is this?"
"Jessie," Wren said. "It's me."
There was a silence on the line so long and so complete that Tom thought the call had dropped. Then Jess Pike began to cry, and then Wren was crying, and then both of them were talking at once, over each other, the way people talk who have been saving up words for a long time, and Deputy Ruiz got up quietly and motioned Tom to follow her, and they went out into the hallway and closed the door.
"She's coming," Ruiz said, a few minutes later, after she had gone back in and talked to Jess herself. "She's leaving Salt Lake right now. It's about four and a half hours. She'll be here around midnight. If she checks out, and if CPS agrees, Wren can stay with her tonight under an emergency kinship placement, and we sort the rest out in court." She rubbed her eyes. "She's been trying to find Wren since March. She called the diner six times. Curtis told her Wren didn't want to talk to her. She called the school and they said Wren had withdrawn. She called CPS twice. Nobody called her back." Ruiz shook her head. "Six times."
Tom leaned against the wall. He was so tired that his bones hurt.
"You don't have to stay," Ruiz said. "You've done more than enough. You can get a room at the Jackson House across the street. I'll call if we need anything else."
"I'll stay," Tom said. "If it's all right. Until the sister gets here. I don't think the kid should have to wait alone."
Ruiz looked at him for a moment. "She won't be alone. I'm here till midnight."
"I know," said Tom. "I'll stay anyway."
So he stayed.
Around eight o'clock, when the sky outside the break room window had gone from blue to orange to a deep, endless violet, and the stars had begun coming out over the mountains the way they only do in places with no lights, Wren turned off the television and looked at him.
"Can I ask you something?"
"Sure."
"Your wife. The one who picked the color." She hesitated. "Is she dead?"
"Four years," Tom said. "Cancer."
Wren nodded slowly, as if this confirmed something. "And you're just riding around. By yourself. In the desert."
"I'm riding to the ocean."
"Why?"
Tom opened his mouth to say something easy, and found that he did not have anything easy to say. He looked at the girl on the couch, fifteen years old, with gravy on her apron and a sunburned nose, who had stood in the middle of a diner that afternoon and told the truth to a sheriff's deputy in front of the man she was most afraid of in the world. He thought she had earned something better than easy.