“Let ’em go,” he said.
“They were filming him.”
“I know what they were doing.”
“You walked right past them.” It came out angrier than I meant it. “You walked right past them and you didn’t say one word.”
He looked at me then, really looked, and his eyes were a pale washed-out blue and they were tired in a way I recognized from my own mirror.
“Ma’am,” he said, “I had about forty seconds to decide whether I was gonna be useful to your son or useful to my own temper. Couldn’t be both.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that.
Eli was sitting up now, picking woodchips off his shorts one at a time and lining them on his knee in a row. That’s what he does after. He builds order back out of whatever’s in reach.
The biker crouched down to Eli’s level, about four feet away, far enough that it wasn’t a demand.
