People sitting around a table eating food somebody made. Rex watched Arthur across the table. Watched him eat. Watched him talk to Helen about her garden, about the kind of tomatoes that grew well in Montana clay, about the specific stubbornness of certain perennials. Watched him argue cheerfully with Dutch about whether a particular county road was better in spring or fall.
Watched Carla tell a story about a case from five years ago that ended badly but still made her laugh in retrospect. Watched Arthur laugh. Real laughter. The kind that surprised the person doing that. Rex ate his food and didn't say much and watched.
After dinner, when people had moved away from the table and conversations had split and Dutch had gone outside to call someone and Carla was on her laptop and Helen was talking to Bev about perennials, Arthur sat back down next to Rex. They sat for a while without talking. Then Arthur said, "I keep thinking about the others." " The ones we don't have names for yet." Rex said. "
Yes." A pause. " There are more. I know there are more. Whatever Daniel and Leake built together, it was too organized to have only four or five victims.
It ran too long." Rex nodded. Karen Shoe's team is going to find them. That's what they do. But by the time they find them, Arthur said, "Some of them will have been sitting alone for months, thinking they're confused, thinking they're losing their minds, thinking nobody's coming."
He looked at Rex. " That's the thing that's hardest to sit with, not what was done to me, what's being done right now to someone I don't know." Rex looked at the table. " Yeah." He said quietly. "
I want to do something." Arthur said. " I don't know what. I'm 83 years old and I've got nothing material to offer. But I want to do something that's worth something." "
You already did." Rex said. " You walked into that courthouse and you told the truth when it would have been much easier not to. You sat across from your son's lawyer for 20 minutes and you didn't break." He paused. "
That's worth something. That's set something in motion that isn't going to stop just because tonight got quiet." Arthur thought about this. " Tomorrow." Rex said. "
Pete Corrigan wants to do a full interview, on record, on camera. He says there are two more papers that want to run the story." " I know." Arthur said. " And the AG's hotline since Carla sent it out this afternoon, it's received 14 new calls from seniors in Montana reporting situations that match the same pattern."
Arthur looked at Rex sharply. " 14." Rex confirmed. " In one afternoon." The old man was quiet. "
Because of you." Rex said. " Because you didn't stay quiet. Because you're sitting here right now." Arthur looked away.
His jaw worked once. When he looked back, his eyes were wet, but he didn't try to hide it. One of the things Rex had noticed about Arthur Brennan in 3 days was that he didn't perform his emotions and he didn't suppress them. He just had them plainly in front of whoever was there. Rex found it one of the most honest things he'd ever been around. "
I almost didn't make it off that bridge." Arthur said. " I know." Rex said. " If you hadn't stopped." "
I stopped." Rex said. " No." " Why?" Arthur said. "
You've told me about your father, but that's not all of it. There's something else. I can tell." Rex looked at him for a long moment, then he said something he hadn't said to anyone. " Because I've been driving past things my whole life."
Rex said. " Situations I saw and kept going. People I could have stopped for and didn't. Told myself it wasn't my problem. Told myself I had somewhere to be."
He paused. " I don't know how many of those I've racked up. I stopped keeping count a long time ago because the count made it hard to sleep." He stopped again, then "You were standing on a bridge and I was right there and I just" his voice went slightly rough. " I just couldn't drive past that one."
Arthur looked at him for a long moment. Outside it had started snowing again. Inside around a table with empty dishes and full coffee cups and the sound of Dutch laughing at something on his phone in the next room. Two men sat in the particular warmth of something that didn't have a clean name, not friendship exactly, not family exactly, but something that sat in the same territory as both and had its own specific weight. " You know what you are."
Arthur said quietly. Rex waited. " You're the person who was always supposed to be doing this." Arthur said. " You just took a long road getting there."
Rex looked at the table, felt something move through him that he didn't try to stop this time because Arthur was right. And for the first time in a very long time, being right about something felt like a place to stand. The morning after Daniel Brennan's arrest, Arthur woke up at 5:43 and couldn't go back to sleep. He lay in Bev's spare room in the dark and listened to the house breathe around him. The furnace cycling on and off, the particular creak of old joinery settling against the cold.
And he thought about his life the way a man thinks about it when something enormous has just shifted and the new landscape hasn't fully come into focus yet. He was 83 years old. He had no money that was immediately accessible. No house. No car.
His possessions amounted to what fit in a trailer with no heat. And most of those were things he'd accumulated over a lifetime that turned out to be replaceable. What he had was this, a borrowed bed in a borrowed room. A photograph of Margaret in a coat pocket. 14 bruises in various stages of healing on his wrists and forearms.
And somewhere on the other side of a wall, the sound of Rex Maddox's boots on a kitchen floor before dawn because Rex apparently did not sleep past 5:00 and found silence suspicious. Arthur lay in the dark and took a quiet inventory of all of it. And then he got up and went to the kitchen. Rex was at the table with coffee and his phone face down in front of him. Not looking at it, just sitting the way Rex sat when he was thinking, which was the way a large structure sits when it's been built to weather things.
He looked up when Arthur came in. " Coffee." Rex said. " Please." Arthur said.