He asked. Meaning the article, meaning the attention, meaning all of it. It depends on what you mean by bad, she said. For Caldwell, his organization lost two corporate sponsors this morning, she said. I've been tracking it.
A construction company and a local insurance agency, both posted on social media, that they were withdrawing support pending the investigation's outcome. A pause. Who told you that? Marcus. He's been watching.
That kid is Sharp. Daniel said he's been waiting 3 years for this story. Emily said Sharp doesn't cover it. Another pause. M I need to tell you something.
She sat down. What? Some of the guys from I mean guys I've known for years. Customers, people I waved to at the grocery store. They've been coming by the shop today.
Not to get work done, just to come by. What do you mean just to come by? I mean, Tom Hollyy stopped in at 8:30 this morning and stood in my doorway for 2 minutes and said, "Daniel, I saw the video and I'm sorry nobody said something in the moment. " And then he left. A pause. I've had six of those today.
Different people just stopping in. Emily felt something press against the back of her throat. "Daniel, I'm fine," he said quickly. "Too quickly," which meant he wasn't entirely. It's just I didn't expect that.
I didn't expect people from here. I thought it would be strangers, the online people. I didn't think he stopped. I didn't think the people I've lived next to for 20 years would show up like that, he finished. People are more decent than you give them credit for, Emily said softly.
Yeah, he said. His voice had gone rough at the edges. Apparently, she heard him clear his throat once. I'm going to finish the Silverado, he said. I'll be home by 7.
I'll make dinner. Okay, Daniel. Yeah. Sunday is the day after tomorrow, she said. I know, he said.
You ready? A long pause, longer than usual. The kind of pause that contained more thought than most people's paragraphs. I don't know what ready looks like for something like this, he said. But yeah, I'm ready.
Saturday passed in a controlled kind of tension, the way the day before something large always does. Emily did three interviews, two by phone, one on video, and handled each one the same way she'd handled everything since Tuesday, directly, specifically without performance. She said what happened. She said what she knew about Daniel. She let the facts do the work that outrage would have done less well.
Daniel came home from the shop at noon on Saturday because he told his customers he was closed in the afternoon, which he almost never did on a Saturday. He didn't explain to Emily why. He just came home and ate lunch and sat in the living room for a while reading a paperback novel with the particular focused contentment of a man determined to have a few hours that belonged only to him. She left him to it. At 3:00, he put the book down and looked at her across the room.
What time does William say they'll arrive? He asked. Sunrise, she said. He said they'd be entering the town limits right around sunrise. Daniel nodded.
Then we should be there. Where? Town square, he said. Same place. He held her gaze.
I'm not meeting them at the edge of town like I need an escort. I'm standing where it happened and they can come to me. She understood that the geometry of it mattered not to make a point, not for show, but because there was a rightness to it that Daniel's internal sense of things required. The same place, the same ground, standing on it, not running from it. Okay, she said.
Town square at sunrise. Wear something warm, he said. Montana mornings. She almost laughed. I know what Montana mornings are, Daniel.
I've lived here as long as you have. The ghost of a smile. Yeah, you have. He picked up his book. She went back to the kitchen.
That evening, Marcus Webb texted her. You should know there are camera crews coming into town. Three that I know of, probably more by morning. Whatever happens Sunday, it's not going to be private. She texted back.
I know. That's fine. He wrote, "Is Daniel okay with that? " She thought about that question for a moment. Then she wrote, "Daniel has been okay with who he is his whole life. The cameras are the other people's problem. " Marcus wrote back.
I'm going to use that as a quote if that's all right. She smiled at her phone. Use it, she wrote. She didn't sleep much that night. Not from fear.
Not from anxiety. Exactly. From something that didn't have a clean name. The particular wakefulness that comes when you know that something is about to happen that cannot be undone that will become part of the permanent record of your life that will exist as a before and after whether you're ready for it or not. Daniel slept of course he did.
She lay beside him in the dark and listened to him breathe and thought about the morning and thought about 600 people who were right now on the road or already parked somewhere nearby, having driven through Friday night and Saturday in an act of loyalty so specific and so concrete and so utterly without theatrics that it still made her chest feel too full to breathe normally. She got up at 4:30. She wasn't going to sleep and she knew it. She made coffee. She stood at the kitchen window.
She thought about Richard Caldwell asleep somewhere in this town, not yet knowing what Sunday morning was going to bring. She thought about the Moore family. She thought about Thomas Greer, the army sergeant, who'd said some debts don't need a reason. She thought about the six men who had come by Daniel's shop on Friday just to stand in the doorway and say, "I'm sorry. " Nobody said something. At 5:15, Daniel came downstairs.
He looked at her standing at the window with her coffee and he said nothing, just went and poured his own and came to stand beside her. They stood together in the quiet kitchen for a while. Then he said, "You ready? " "No. " "Oh," she said honestly. "Good," he said. "Neither am I.
Let's go. " They drove to the town square in the dark, arriving just before 6:00. The square was empty when they got there, or nearly a few camera crews were already setting up, which meant the news had traveled further and faster than even Emily had tracked. She saw a van with a network affiliate logo. She saw two men with professional cameras and another with a boom mic talking quietly near the fountain. She saw a police cruiser parked at the edge of the square with its lights off just sitting there, which could mean anything.
Daniel looked at the cruiser. "You think they're going to try to stop it? " Emily asked. They can't stop it, Daniel said. Public road, public space. You can't tell 600 law-abiding citizens on legal vehicles that they can't travel through a town.
He paused. They know that they're here because someone told them to be here, and they're trying to figure out what their role is. They walked to the center of the square and stood there under the same sky where one week a security officer had put his hand on Daniel Walker's collar and told him he didn't belong. The irony of standing in that exact in that exact square waiting for the opposite of what had happened to him here. Emily felt it without needing to name it.
A few towns people began to arrive. Not many at first. A couple she recognized from the neighborhood. A man she knew worked at the post office, an older woman who Emily thought might be a retired school teacher. They came quietly without fanfare and stood at the edges of the square in the early morning cold and they waited.
More came, then more. By 6:30, there were perhaps 80 people standing in and around the square. By 6:45, closer to 150. People who had seen the video, people who had read Marcus' article, people who had been sitting with something uncomfortable in their chests for a week and had decided that Sunday morning was the moment to show up and say so without words. Daniel stood in the center and said nothing.