Power is what you need right now. " By day four, she had stopped thinking about power and started thinking about survival. By day seven, she had stopped thinking about survival and started thinking about her mother's face. Her mother's face the way it looked when Maya called home on Sunday nights. the specific expression of a woman who had worried about her children every day of their lives and had learned to wear it quietly, like a layer beneath everything else, so it didn't crush the ordinary joy of ordinary moments. That expression would be on her face right now, except the ordinary joy was gone. Only the worry remained undiluted, running without a bottom.
Maya Torres was not going to let her mother spend the rest of her life with only that. She started watching Frank and Roy the way they watched her. Not obviously, slowly learning the rhythms the same way they had learned hers. when Roy got distracted, when Frank's attention shifted, which exits they clocked automatically, and which ones they had already decided weren't viable. And on the 11th day, in a diner on Route 89, with a hairline crack in the laminate, running from the salt shaker to the edge of the table, she watched the waitress pick up the coffee pot and walk past the booth. She watched the napkin land on the window table.
She watched the woman's hands not shake. Something moved inside her chest. A word she hadn't let herself think for 11 days because thinking it made the distance between where she was and where she needed to be feel of an unbearable hope. She looked up just once directly at the woman behind the counter. The woman did not nod, did not smile, did not do anything that Frank or Roy could read, but she held the look for one second longer than a waitress looks at a table.