He pats me on the shoulder as I wipe my hands on the rag and drop into the driver’s seat.
Through the windshield, all I can see is the hood. On the other side, Rainer is standing at the front of the vehicle.
I turn the key.
Nothing.
“Hang on.” Rainer’s voice comes from the front. “It needs tuning.”
There’s just the sound of Rainer’s hands moving beneath the hood.
“Try it now,” he yells out.
I turn the key again.
The engine catches this time, rough at first, then finds its footing—the idle evening out into something steady, low, and real.
A sound I have been waiting for longer than I want to admit.
I sit there for a second with my hands on the wheel, letting it run before I get out.
Rainer comes around to the driver’s side and he is smiling at me. Not the dry half-smirk he gives me when I say something funny despite his best efforts to remain unmoved. This is the real one. The smile of a man who has watched something he believed in from the beginning finally prove him right.
He is proud of me.
And right here, with the engine running steady, I wonder how much more of his good I can keep taking.
For a second, I am eighteen again, standing in this same workshop with this same man who looked at a kid with bloody knuckles and a chip on his shoulder the size of a building, and I’ve never fully understood why he kept me around.
I think about all the times I stood at this car in those early days, hands covered in grease, working on it after Rainer locked up, piecing it back together. And Skylar, near the bench. All sharp mouth and fire, with those eyes that never missed a thing, no matter how hard she pretended otherwise.
I had wanted to finish this car and take her somewhere in it, somewhere that was just ours. Just the road, her, and whatever came next.
Fuck, I still want that.
Ricky arrives just after four.
He comes in the same way he did two days ago, as if the room were expecting him and had been holding his spot. Different suitthis time. Same two men behind him. Same unhurried walk of a man who has never once had to rush toward anything because everything he wants has always come to him eventually.
Griff ducks under the roller door last, that Zippo already in his hand, open and shut, open and shut. The sound of it crawls up my spine the way it always has.
I stand near the Chevy with my arms at my sides and my jaw locked, watching them come in. I sense every inch of what this is. My mess. My past. My debt, walking into the one place that has never asked anything of me except to show up and do the work.
Rainer comes out of his office, carrying an old canvas bag.
He doesn’t make a show of it. Just crosses the workshop and sets it on the bench with a dull, heavy thud that lands straight in my gut and stays there.
Ricky looks at the bag, then at me.
His smile never quite reaches his eyes. It never has. That smile is furniture. It means nothing except that he is comfortable. And a comfortable Ricky is its own particular kind of threat.
“One hundred and three thousand dollars like we agreed upon,” Rainer says, flat and even. “Count it.”
One of Ricky’s men steps forward, takes the bag, unzips it, and starts going through it with the practiced efficiency of someone who has done this before and will do it again.
Griff stays near the roller door. Arms loose. That rotten curve still sits on his mouth.
I stand still and watch as the money is counted because I deserve to. Every second of it. I created this and I cannot avert my gaze from its consequences.
