“Okay, I’ll take care of it.”

“Oh, and you have a phone message.” With her elbow, Dawn pushes a piece of paper towards him. “Someone named Cassandra Coelho?”

That fucking reporter. Shawn crumples up the paper, throws it into the trash. “Thanks,” he says.

Dawn puts the dispensers back down with a crash. “God, I’m so sorry,” she says, wiping her hands on her apron. “I’m an idiot. How’s your mom?”

“Fine. And you’re not an idiot.” He doesn’t want to talk about Kate, but it was stupid of him to expect that he could get away with not talking about her, especially with Dawn. Has she seen the video? he wonders. Has everyone at the restaurant seen it? “She’s in a coma, actually. But the doctors say she could come out at any time.”

“That’s good,” says Dawn. She studies him carefully. “Was it an accident, then?”

Shawn readjusts the papers on the clipboard, avoiding her gaze. “I don’t know, Dawn. I didn’t get to talk to her.”

“Oh.” When it becomes clear that he isn’t going to say anything else, Dawn picks the napkin dispensers up again and carries them out into the dining room. Shawn knows what she was waiting to hear – the same thing that all the reporters want to know, the one thing that Shawn doesn’t have an answer for.

It’s not the who, what, when, or how that people care about. It’s the why.

—

A few weeks earlier, Shawn was offered another job. He had gone out for drinks with his buddy Alex from high school, home from Ottawa for his niece’s graduation. “You need to stop wasting your life in that tourist trap,” Alex had said, after probably one Heineken too many, and then added, “Come work for me.” At the time, Shawn laughed it off, but Alex’s offer rattled around in his head for the next few days, until finally he realized he needed to talk to someone about it, to put it out there in the world, to see it reflected back in someone else’s eyes. He needed someone to tell him he was crazy, that he had another kid on the way, a family to consider, a duty to Nik.