Chapter 50: Thanksgiving
Sarah filled him in on the corridor situation in about four minutes, standing in the hallway outside room 214.
The man Simon had zip-tied to the supply cart was named Riordan Payne — freelance intelligence broker, occasional contract killer, operating on behalf of a buyer whose identity Sarah was declining to share. His objective had been the storage card. The card itself was a component of a nuclear authorization protocol that was not supposed to be outside a secure facility, which was a problem with its own complex backstory that Sarah was also declining to share.
Chuck appeared from the elevator while Sarah was finishing, which explained the Nerd Herd lanyard and the expression of someone who had been in a hospital for non-medical reasons.
"You're here," Chuck said, looking at Simon.
"My girlfriend is in 214," Simon said.
"She's—"
"Mild concussion. She's fine."
Chuck accepted this with the equanimity of someone who had long since stopped being surprised by the specificity of Simon's civilian complications.
Sarah was on the phone with Casey. Simon waited.
When she ended the call, she looked at him. "Casey wants to debrief you."
"Tell Casey I'm getting food for Meg and I'll be available after she's settled." Simon picked up the takeout bag from where he'd set it on the nurses' station counter. "He knows where to find me."
Sarah opened her mouth.
"She's been in a hospital bed for twelve hours because of me," Simon said. "I'm getting her pasta. Casey can debrief me in an hour."
Sarah closed her mouth.
He went into room 214.
Meg ate the pasta, which had survived the collision and the corridor incident and arrived at appropriate temperature. Simon sat in the chair beside the bed while she ate, and she asked what had happened in the hallway, and he gave her the version that was mostly accurate.
"You zip-tied a man to a supply cart," she said.
"With a restraint cable from the cart itself," Simon said. "I improvised."
"And the thing he dropped."
"Being handled."
Meg ate another forkful of pasta and looked at him with the specific expression she'd been developing over the past few months — the one that registered more than it said.
"You're going to keep doing this," she said. "Whatever it is."
"Yes," Simon said.
She nodded. Not happy about it, not resigned to it — somewhere more complicated than either of those. Decided.
"Then I'm going to keep getting better at training," she said. "So I can handle whatever ends up near me because of you."
"That's the plan," Simon said.
She went back to her pasta.
Casey's debrief was efficient — twenty minutes in the hospital parking garage, no recording, no paperwork. Simon told him what had happened in order and with detail. Casey asked three clarifying questions and wrote nothing down.
"The Intersect flagged the serial number," Casey said at the end.
"Yes," Simon said.
Casey looked at him. "The loading percentage is—"
"I don't know what it is," Simon said. "I don't have a visible tracker. I just know things that I know and I notice when the source is the Intersect rather than regular knowledge."
Casey absorbed this. "That's going to get more frequent."
"Probably," Simon said. "Is that a problem?"
"It's a variable," Casey said. Which with Casey meant: I haven't decided yet.
He paid Simon for the operation — cash, an envelope from his inside jacket pocket — and they went back inside separately.
Sunday morning. Mild concussion protocols observed. The doctor signed off on discharge at nine fifteen.
Meg was standing in the parking lot in her own clothes with the particular energy of someone who had been in a hospital bed for twenty hours and was very ready not to be.
"Training?" she said.
Simon looked at her.
"I'm fine," she said. "The headache is gone and my balance is normal. I want to go back."
He thought about it for a realistic two seconds. Pushing too hard too soon was the mistake. But Meg knew her body and she had none of the residual symptoms that would make continuing inadvisable.
"Light session," he said. "No sparring. Forms only. We work on the transition sequences you were slow on yesterday."
"Fine," she said, getting in the Mustang. "Let's go."
They trained until noon.
He took her through the form sequences slowly, correcting the places where yesterday's session had revealed gaps. She moved through them with the particular focused attention of someone who had learned something painful and was reorganizing around the lesson.
By eleven thirty the sequences were cleaner than they'd been before the session.
He called a stop. She argued. He won.
"Go home," he said. "Write down what you noticed about your own movement today. Physical sensations, not technical analysis. We'll talk about it next session."
She left.
Simon drove to Dom's garage.
Jesse had the Mustang's performance data on screen when Simon walked in — the full readout from the installed sensors, mapped against the previous baseline.
Simon studied it for ten minutes.
Then he wrote a parts list.
"Brian," he said, crossing the garage. "Can you order this at Race's Edge tomorrow?"
Brian looked at the list. "You're going again?"
"Six hundred horsepower isn't enough for the invitational field this year." Simon had done the math. The previous year's invitational had brought in cars from collectors and serious racers across Southern California — professional builds, purpose-built platforms, vehicles that the track saw once a year and nowhere else. Some of them had been running north of seven hundred horsepower. This year, coming back after losing, they'd bring more.
"Eight hundred is what I need," Simon said. "Reliably. With margin."
Dom had been listening from two bays over. He walked over and looked at the list.
"This is aggressive," Dom said.
"I know."
"You're aware those cars are going to be even faster this year."
"That's why I need eight hundred," Simon said. "If I show up with six and they show up with seven-fifty, I'm competitive but not dominant. I need dominant."
Dom looked at him for a moment.
"You've already made up your mind," Dom said.
"I made up my mind two weeks ago," Simon said.
Dom handed the list back to Brian. "Order it."
Brian took the list, looked at it, looked at Simon. "You know this is going to cost—"
"I know what it costs," Simon said. "How fast can you get it here?"
"Week, maybe ten days for the specialized stuff."
"Make it a week," Simon said.
Brian pocketed the list and went inside to call the supplier.
Simon changed into work clothes and spent the next four hours pulling the Mustang back apart — the engine bay looking increasingly like a project rather than a car, which was exactly what it was. The existing modifications came out, the new mounting positions were prepared, the wire harness was routed for the components that were coming.
By seven he'd done everything he could without the new parts.
He cleaned up, showered in the garage's washroom, and changed.
Thanksgiving was five days out.
Thanksgiving arrived cold by Los Angeles standards, which meant it was sixty-two degrees and everyone was wearing a jacket they didn't technically need.
Dom's backyard had been running since noon — the grill going, music from the outdoor speakers, the extended crew and various connected people cycling through over the course of the afternoon. Mia had been cooking since eight AM and the kitchen smelled the way the kitchen smelled when Mia was cooking, which was one of Simon's more reliable associations with the concept of home.
Simon's parents had called the night before. The platform schedule had pushed again — a complication in the drilling operation that was going to keep the crew in the Gulf through the holiday. They'd be home for Christmas, his mother said. She said it with the specific confidence of someone who was not entirely sure but needed to project certainty.
He'd told her he was going to Dom's. She'd sounded relieved.
The turkey had been in the oven since morning and was now on the outdoor table under a cover while Dom's crew arranged the rest of the spread with the comfortable efficiency of people who had done this before.
Letty was at the grill with a platter of ribs, several of which were considerably darker than they'd been intended to be.
"That one's done," Simon said, from six feet away.
Letty looked at the rib in question. Then at Simon. "It's caramelized."
"It's on fire."
She removed it from the grill with tongs and deposited it on the edge of the platter with the dignity of someone refusing to acknowledge that this was not the intended outcome.
"You cook it next time," she said.
"I'm happy to," Simon said.
"Then do it."
"I will."
"Then stop talking about it."
Dom came through the back door carrying the turkey platter and set it at the center of the table with the authority of a man who had settled the matter by producing the main event.
The table filled up. Vince and Leon had brought their respective dates. Jesse was there. Brian was there — sitting close to Mia in the way that had stopped being something anyone commented on and had simply become the configuration of that side of the table.
"Before we eat," Dom said, from the head of the table, "we should say something." He looked around the group, landed on Simon. "You're the youngest. That's your job."
"I didn't do anything," Simon said. "I showed up."
"You drove for us all year," Letty said. "You fixed things. You were here."
"Also," Dom said, with the closest thing to a smile he usually managed, "you're the one who's going to have to get up in front of everyone in about thirty seconds, so you might want to start thinking."
Simon looked around the table.
Mia. Brian. Letty. Vince. Jesse. Leon and his date. Dom.
The specific warmth of people who had decided to be each other's family without anyone voting on it.
Simon put his beer down, folded his hands, and looked at the table.
"I'm not particularly religious," he said, "so I'm going to go off-script." He looked up. "We're grateful for the food, obviously. We're grateful for the people around this table. We're grateful for the cars—"
Letty: "Amen to that."
"—and for the fact that the year has been as eventful as it has been and we're all still sitting here, which at various points was not entirely guaranteed." He paused. "And I'm grateful that when I was fifteen and I had no idea what I was doing, Dom's garage was somewhere I was allowed to be."
A silence.
Not uncomfortable. The kind that means something landed.
"Amen," Dom said.
"Amen," everyone else said, in various overlapping registers.
Beers went up.
Simon raised his.
"To not being a guest," Dom said, looking at Simon.
"To not being a guest," Simon said.
They drank.
Mia served. The food was good — it was always good when Mia cooked — and the table was loud with the particular comfortable noise of people who had nothing to prove to each other and a lot to eat.
Simon sat at his place between Letty and Jesse, ate a substantial amount, argued cheerfully with Letty about the ribs (she eventually admitted they were slightly over), and spent a portion of the meal watching Brian and Mia at the far end of the table with the quiet satisfaction of someone who had predicted a thing correctly.
His phone stayed in his pocket.
Casey didn't call.
No one ran into him in a hospital corridor.
Nothing exploded.
It was, by any reasonable measure, exactly what Thanksgiving was supposed to be.
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