“Then you know I can’t let you do that.” My voice comes out tight and low, barely held together. “I brought this mess to your door. To the one place that has never asked anything of me except to show up and do the work.”
The words scrape on the way out but I don’t care. The shame is too great to hold in silence.
“You should have let me go the day you found me in that skip,” I say. “You should have called the cops, shut the door, and moved on with your life.”
Rainer turns around slowly.
I keep going because stopping now would mean feeling everything I am saying and I am not sure I can survive it. “Instead, you kept me. You gave me work. Gave me somewhereto sleep. Gave me a fucking key and a way to pretend I wasn’t the same piece of shit I had been when you found me.”
His jaw clenches, but he does not speak, and somehow that is worse. It’s the silence of a man who is not going to argue because he does not think there is anything to argue about.
“And now look.” I point one hand toward the open roller door, toward the street beyond it, where Ricky’s car is probably still warm. “Now my past is standing in your garage, in a suit, asking you for over a hundred thousand dollars, and you are acting like this is a bill you can just pay and file away.”
“It is a bill.”
“No, it’s not.” My voice cracks sharply through the workshop. “It’s my fucking bill.”
I hear my own breathing, rough and uneven, in the stillness of the workshop.
“I have cost you every step of the way,” I say, quieter now. “Every fucking step. Since the day I turned up here, trouble has been right behind me, and you just keep standing in front of it like that is your job.”
Rainer’s eyes narrow, but he neither moves nor says anything.
“Why?” The word scrapes out of me. It makes my throat burn. It makes something in my chest seem young and foolish and too vulnerable. “Why do you keep me around? I have brought you nothing but trouble. I’m not your son. I’m not even your own blood. You don’t owe me shit. So why?”
For a long moment, he just looks at me, then steps closer.
“Because you are worth it,” he says.
The words hit me so hard that I can’t breathe. I glance away because something on my face is about to give me away.
He doesn’t let me get far. “Zane, look at me.”
I hate that command but I obey it anyway.
His eyes hold mine, steady and certain. “Some people, you know they are worth it the same way you know an engine is worth saving. Damage is not the whole story.”
My throat goes tight.
“You are not trouble, son.”
Son.
There’s that word again. The one that lands in the middle of me and stays there.
“You are a man who was never given a fair start,” he says. “I know the difference.”
I stare at him.
There are moments in a man’s life when the right words find the wrong place inside him and split him open anyway. This is one of them. Because I want to believe him. Fuck, I want to believe him so badly it hurts. But wanting to believe something and knowing how to live inside it are not the same thing.
My chest is too full and too tight right now that I have to turn away.
“Zane.”
I walk toward the stairs that lead up to the apartment.
“Zane.”
