The thought almost sends the ratchet across the workshop.
Instead, I lower it carefully onto the bench, press both hands flat against the edge, and breathe.
In.
Out.
In again.
Then out again.
By the time dawn creeps through the high windows, I tighten the final connection.
The light catches on the hood, on the scratches in the paint, on the old steering wheel visible through the windscreen. All thathistory in the metalwork, all those years of sitting in some old man’s shed being forgotten, and Rainer saw something worth saving in it and handed it to me.
My car.
The one he kept for me. The one I started before everything went sideways and took the rest of my life with it.
I look at it as my body aches from a night spent bent under the hood. My eyes burn from no sleep and my chest carries the weight of a decision I have been circling since midnight. Whether to stay or go. What both Skylar’s and Rainer’s worlds would be like without me pulling through them like a fault line. Both of them would no longer have to brace for whatever I drag in behind me next.
People have been telling me since I was old enough to remember that I was trouble. Teachers. Principals. Social workers with their clipboards, tired eyes, and quiet certainty that boys like me would never amount to anything worth the effort of believing in.
I hear Rainer before I see him.
Slow steps through the side door. A muttered curse as his knee catches the frame, the same knee that has been giving him grief since before I arrived and that he refuses to have looked at because that would require admitting it exists. Then he steps into the middle of the workshop and sees me standing there.
“You sleep down here?” he asks.
“No.”
“You lie badly for someone who does it so often.”
I wipe my hands on the rag. “Didn’t sleep.”
“No shit.”
He stands beside me. His hair sticks up on one side and his shirt is buttoned wrong at the collar. His face has that morning look of a man whose body spent the night filing formalcomplaints. He looks exactly like what he is, an old man who got up before he was ready.
He leans over the engine bay, checks the line I fixed, runs his fingers over the bracket, and looks down into the guts of the thing I have spent the whole night trying to make run.
“You finished it,” he says.
“Yeah.”
He looks at me with that expression on his face that I’ve never known how to handle and have spent years trying not to need.
“You did good, son.”
That word. Son.
It hits me straight in the chest and stays there, warm , heavy, and entirely unearned. I avert my gaze quickly because a son is supposed to make a man proud, not cost him a hundred and three thousand dollars before breakfast.
“Does it start?” he adds.
“I don’t know. I just tightened the final bolt.”
“Well, jump in and see if it ticks over.”
