Friday evening. I'm sitting on my bed with my phone, scrolling back through my call history from months ago. Way back. Past Tasha, past Jordan, past the burner phones, past numbers I don't even recognize anymore - fugitive-era contacts, safehouses, people I called once and never spoke to again. There. Unknown number, North Carolina area code, January something. That's Victor.

  I could call. But Victor is a texter. He responds to texts the way he responds to dispatch orders - efficiently, on his timeline, no wasted words. So I text.

  Hey. It's Sam. Your granddaughter. Quick question about the Thornton Transport thing, and also just checking in. Call me when you have a minute?

  I stare at the message for a second after I send it. "Just checking in." When did I start checking in on Victor Blanc? When did that become a thing I do?

  Twenty minutes later, while I'm halfheartedly doing calc homework, my phone rings. Same North Carolina area code.

  "Sam."

  "Hey, Grandpa Vic."

  It comes out before I think about it. Just slips through, like a word I've been holding in my mouth without realizing. There's a pause on the other end - not long, maybe two seconds - and then Victor moves past it the way he moves past everything, without comment but with that slight shift in vocal register that means he noticed.

  "What's your question." he states, with a period at the end.

  "Back when they set up your trip to Philly - someone called Maeve and arranged your time off. Did you ever figure out how?"

  "Yes. I wrote a note about it. Let me get it," he says, and then I hear something unlatching and a paper being rumpled on the other end. He's on speaker.

  I wait. I hope he's not waiting for me to ask, but I ask anyway, just to nudge the process along. "And?"

  "Talked to Maeve about it afterward. She says I called. Used my name, my voice, asked for the days off. She didn't question it because it sounded like me." Highway noise in the background. A truck engine rumbling. "It wasn't me. I never called."

  "Someone used your voice."

  "That's what I said," he grumbles. "Not fond of that. My voice is mine. Not someone else's."

  The Doppelganger. Elena Morales, or whatever she's calling herself now - the Kingdom's shapeshifter. She didn't just copy faces. She copied voices well enough to fool someone who talks to Victor on the radio every day. And they did it all in service of Maya's stupid revenge plot not even against me but against my Mom.

  "Why didn't you tell me?"

  "You didn't ask." He says it like it's obvious, because to him it is. "I told you I wasn't going to contact you. I meant that."

  "Right." I rub my face. "So the information was just sitting there waiting for me to pick it up."

  "That's generally how information works."

  I almost laugh. Almost. "Okay. Thank you. That's - that's useful."

  "Is that all?"

  Here's where I could hang up. Bullet confirmed, mission accomplished, move on to the next chamber. But I don't. I pull my legs up onto the bed and lean back against the headboard and say, "How are you doing?"

  Another pause. Longer this time. I don't think people ask Victor how he's doing very often. Maybe Maeve. Is there really anybody else in his life? Or am I the only person in the past thirty some years who has called Victor Blanc and asked how he's doing?

  "Fine," he says. Then, after a moment: "I got another cat."

  "You got another - how many is that now?"

  "Three. Coal, Box, and Diesel."

  "You named a cat Diesel."

  "He sleeps on the engine block when it's warm. Seemed appropriate."

  I'm grinning. I can't help it. Victor Blanc, the man who terrorized his children and lives like a ghost and speaks in monosyllables, has three cats and he named the newest one after truck fuel. "When did you get him?"

  "February. Kitten. Someone left a box at a rest stop in Georgia. I took one." He pauses. "I noticed that I wanted to. That was... new."

  "New how?"

  "I've had preferences before. I prefer black coffee. I prefer driving at night. But those are functional - they relate to efficiency. Sugar gives me the jitters. Sunlight gets in my eyes. This was different." I can almost hear him organizing his thoughts, sorting them into categories. "I saw the kittens and I had a response that was not related to function. I wanted one. Just to have."

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  I sit with that for a second. Victor describing the experience of wanting something like he's reporting a newly discovered weather phenomenon. I saw the kittens and I had a response. That's - is that growth? Can you call it growth when a seventy-something-year-old sociopath notices for the first time that he has desires beyond efficiency?

  Yeah. I think you can. It's just a very small, very kitten-sized growth.

  "That's good, Grandpa Vic. That's really good."

  "Mm." He doesn't agree or disagree. "There's something else."

  "Yeah?"

  "I have a..." He pauses, and for the first time in either of our conversations I hear Victor Blanc search for a word. "Companion. Cassie. She's a driver. Sixty-five. We've been... together isn't the right word. Proximate."

  I sit up. "You have a GIRLFRIEND?"

  "That's not the right word either."

  "Grandpa Vic. You have a girlfriend."

  "She doesn't get in my way," he says, which is apparently his version of a love confession. "She drives for a different outfit but she doesn't own a rig. Sometimes she rides with me between jobs. Sits in the cabin. Doesn't talk much. Forces me to eat when I forget."

  "Forces you to eat."

  "She throws food at me. Sandwiches, mostly. Difficult to ignore a sandwich hitting you in the shoulder."

  I'm pressing my hand over my mouth because I'm going to laugh and I don't want him to hear it and think I'm laughing at him, even though I sort of am. "What's she like?"

  "Quiet. Uninterested in fixing me. Doesn't care for children or neighbors. Prefers being left alone." He pauses. "We have that in common."

  "So you're two very alone people who are alone... together?"

  "That's reasonably accurate."

  "And you like that?"

  "Like is a strong word. It suits me. It suits her. She's the first person in maybe forty years whose company hasn't made me want to leave the room." Another pause. "She also hates small talk, which is... preferable."

  I lie back on my bed and stare at the ceiling. Okay. Victor Blanc has a girlfriend named Cassie who throws sandwiches at him and doesn't try to fix him and hates children. This is - I don't know what this is. It's something. "She says if she had neighbors she wouldn't be able to resist the urge to drive her truck through their houses. Something about a 'aitch-oh-aye', but I'm not going to pretend I know what that is."

  "Are you happy?" I ask, and immediately feel stupid for asking because Victor doesn't do happy. Happy isn't in his operating system.

  "I don't experience happiness the way you mean it," he says, and there's no self-pity in it, just a factual report. "But my life has a shape now that it didn't have before. Coal and Box and Diesel. Cassie when she's around. Maeve on the radio. Routes I know. Places I stop." He's quiet for a moment. "It's less... You said it was a punishment. I think it's less punishment shaped now. Maybe I was unconsciencely trying to hurt myself for some reason. Maybe not. I'm not a psychologist. I just drive trucks."

  "Less punishment shaped because of the cats? And Cassie?"

  "Because of the kitten. Specifically." Another one of those pauses where I can tell he's been thinking about something for a long time and is choosing to say it out loud. "You asked me a question last time. About applying politeness to my whole life. I've been considering it."

  "And?"

  "The kitten was an experiment. I saw something I wanted and instead of analyzing whether it was efficient, I just... took it. And then I noticed that having it made things different. Not better in a way I can measure. Just different. Letting a little more uncertainty come in at the edges where I can trust it to not ruin things. Diesel gets locked in the back when I need to pay attention to the road. She knows not to bother me while I'm driving." He clears his throat. "Cassie was the same kind of experiment. I didn't seek her out. She was just there, at a rest stop, and I didn't leave when she sat down. Normally I would have."

  "You let her sit with you."

  "Yes. And then the next time, I let her sit with me again. And then she started riding along. And I noticed I didn't mind." He says this like he's describing a scientific finding. "I have spent most of my life leaving."

  "And this time you didn't," I point out, trying to resist the urge to say 'did not' in his tone of voice. My eyes are doing something I'd rather they didn't. I blink hard and stare at the ceiling fan. "Grandpa Vic, I have to be honest with you. I'm sitting here having a lot of complicated feelings about this."

  "About what specifically."

  "About the fact that you terrorized your kids and now you have a nice girlfriend and three cats and you're - you're doing okay." I breathe. "Part of me thinks you don't deserve that. Part of me thinks you should still be miserable. And I know that's not rational. You've been in jail. You've been alone for forty years. You've already done more time in isolation than most people could survive. Adding more suffering doesn't un-hurt my Mom."

  "That's correct," Victor says, with the tone of someone confirming a math equation.

  "So I'm choosing to be happy for you," I say, and my voice cracks a little on it. "Not because you deserve it. Just because being happy that someone's life is getting a little less empty seems like a better use of my energy than being angry about something that happened before I was born."

  Victor is quiet for a long time. The highway rumbles.

  "That's a mature position," he says finally.

  "Don't call me mature, it makes me feel like a cheese."

  "Hm." A sound that might be a laugh. Hard to tell. "You sound different than last time."

  "Different how?"

  "More solid." He considers. "You didn't seem very certain last time. There was a sort of..." A pause. "Fear. And a sort of empty sensation. Like some of the bums I knock out at bars. Someone who doesn't have anything else going for them except what they're doing right now. You sound less like that."

  That hits somewhere behind my sternum. I don't respond for a second.

  "Yeah," I say. "I'm working on it."

  "Good. Whatever I deserve, by any qualchurtative measure, you deserve just as much if not more," he points out.

  "Qualitative?" I correct him.

  "Sure."

  "Well... thank you, Grandpa Vic."

  "You're welcome."

  We sit in silence for a moment. I can hear his engine, the road, the distant sound of what might be a cat meowing.

  "Is that Diesel?"

  "He wants dinner. I should go."

  "Yeah. Me too." I hesitate. "Can I call you again sometime? Not about the investigation. Just... to check in."

  A pause. "I won't promise to answer every time."

  "That's fine."

  "But I'll answer sometimes."

  "That's enough."

  "Goodbye, Sam."

  "Bye, Grandpa Vic."

  He hangs up. I put my phone down on the bed and lie there for a while, staring at the ceiling, listening to my parents talk downstairs. Dad's saying something about the Sixers. Mom's laughing.

  Even Victor has people who would miss him. Maeve would miss him - not romantically, not dramatically, but in the way you miss a reliable presence that you've gotten used to hearing on the radio every day. Cassie would miss the person who lets her sit in his cabin without asking her to talk. The cats would miss the hand that feeds them. It's not much, by most people's standards. But it's not nothing. Even the loneliest man I know has weight. His life has gravity. Small, but real.

  I think about that for a while. And then I think about my list.