Dale joked that Colter had been promoted from convoy leader to amateur detective.
Colter replied that amateur detectives generally had worse motorcycles.
But beneath the easy humor, everyone felt the same tension.
What waited beyond the eastern passage?
Anna spent the first night reading copies of her father’s notebook.
She found small details no official report could ever have contained.
Thomas worried about whether Anna had eaten breakfast.
He complained about Caleb snoring.
He wrote that Ruth would be furious when he returned.
He drew a crooked rabbit beside Anna’s name.
There were practical notes about timber supports and airflow.
There were ordinary thoughts between them.
That ordinariness broke Anna’s heart more completely than dramatic final words would have.
Her father had not spent his last hours composing himself into a legend.
He had remained a man.
A husband who knew his wife was angry.
A father who wondered whether his daughter had eaten.
A friend who refused to leave another man underground.
Anna had spent nearly three decades imagining abandonment.
Now she understood that the truth was almost its opposite.
Thomas had returned home.
Then he had left again because somebody else had not.
That knowledge did not erase the years without him.
It did not make his choice painless.
But it changed the question Anna had carried since childhood.
Why wasn’t I enough to make you come home?
The answer was that he had come home.
And she had been enough.
She had always been enough.
Before dawn, Anna sat outside the motel room with a blanket around her shoulders.
Colter emerged from the room downstairs carrying coffee.
He saw her and climbed the stairs.
“Couldn’t sleep?”
“No.”
“Me either.”
He handed her the second cup.
She accepted it.
“Do all bikers carry extra coffee?”
“Only the highly trained ones.”
She smiled.
For a while they watched mist drift above the parking lot.
Then Anna said, “I hated him.”
“Your father?”
“Sometimes.”
Colter nodded.