Wren nodded once, satisfied, the way you nod when a deal has been made. Then she hugged him, quickly, hard, around the middle, and let go, and went out to the Corolla with her sister, and Tom stood in the doorway of the substation and watched the taillights go east down the main street of Eureka until they disappeared into the enormous dark.
He called Molly at seven-thirty the next morning, from the gravel parking lot of the Jackson House hotel, sitting on the Road King with his helmet in his lap.
His hands were shaking so badly he misdialed twice. The third time, it rang. Once. Twice. Three times. He thought, she isn't going to answer, and he was almost relieved, and he hated himself for being relieved.
On the fourth ring, she answered.
"Hello?"
Her voice. He had not heard her voice in three years. It was exactly the same and completely different, and for a moment he could not say anything at all.
"Hello?" Molly said again. Then, slower, with something in it he could not read: "Dad?"
"Hi, Mol," Tom said. "It's me."
He did not know, afterward, how long they talked. He sat on the bike in the parking lot of an old hotel in a silver-mining town in the middle of Nevada with the sun coming up over the mountains behind him, and he said the things he had been carrying for three years. That he was sorry. That she had been right about the trial, or at least right to want to fight. That he had been wrong to say what he said in the church, wrong in every word of it, and that he had known it was wrong while he was saying it, and that he had been too much of a coward to call. That he had a picture of Carter in his wallet. That he did not know how to fix any of it, but he wanted to try, if she would let him.
Molly cried. He cried. At one point a man came out of the hotel carrying a suitcase and looked at the gray-bearded biker sobbing into a cell phone in the parking lot, and quietly went back inside.
"Where are you?" Molly asked finally.
"Nevada. Middle of nowhere. A town called Eureka."
"What on earth are you doing in Eureka, Nevada?"
He laughed, wetly. "It's a long story. Involves a coffee cup and a fifteen-year-old girl and two guys who are going to prison. I'll tell you the whole thing sometime. If you want."
There was a pause.
"I'm six hours from Eureka," Molly said. "Sacramento's six hours. Carter's got a birthday party at the park on Saturday. He's turning three. There's going to be a bounce house. It's going to be loud and terrible." Another pause, shorter. "You could come. If you wanted. If you're not busy riding to the ocean."
Tom closed his eyes.
"The ocean'll keep," he said.
The letter came in November, forwarded from his old shop in Grand Junction, where the young man with the sleeve tattoos had pinned it to the bulletin board until Tom came through. It was written in pencil on lined notebook paper, in small cramped capital letters that pressed so hard into the page they came through on the other side.