Several sessions with a couples counselor in downtown Houston—a heavyset white woman who wore way too much turquoise—had led to his decision to come off the road. At least, he thought it was his decision. It got hot in that room a lot, fairly musky with the work of excavating petty resentments only to bury them again—for good this time. And he admitted to zoning out once or twice. But they had ended their quartet of sessions—I think you guys are going to make it—with Darren agreeing to return to the Houston office of the Texas Rangers and work on the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas federal and state joint task force from his desk. Monday through Friday, he parked his Chevy in front of the office, took his lunch to his narrow cubicle, and spent hours and hours rooting through digital-surveillance data on the Aryan Brotherhood. Phone and bank records. Chat-room chatter. He was a desk jockey now, home most evenings by six, depending on traffic. That Lisa didn’t make him do all of this stone-cold sober made him love her a little harder. Enough, he hoped, to cover the anger he felt over her demand that he stay off the road. Not that being home was the worst.

There was beer there.

And sex.

The thing with his mother nagged at him; sure it did.

But for a while he’d managed to convince himself that Bell’s motives were not so much vindictive as desperate. She was a woman on the cusp of sixty who lived alone in a rented trailer and whose only son was childless and spare in his affections, content to see his mother once a quarter, even less if he thought he could get away with it. Her boyfriend was both married and her boss, and he paid her less than minimum wage to clean toilets five days a week. She hadn’t had a man to herself since she was in high school, and she bitterly resented the entire Mathews family for robbing her of the life she thought marrying Darren’s father would have given her; she nursed her acrimony like a foundling pressed to her breast. The debt had now been laid at Darren’s feet. He’d spent the past two months calling his mother daily, stopping by her place nearly every weekend. He cleared tufts of chickweed and bluegrass from around her trailer, swept the stairs, and cleaned the gutters without being asked, always leaving her a few hundred dollars and a case of beer on his way out.