I glance at him. “I was in prison, Rainer.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
The bastard always knows exactly where to press.
“I’m aware I don’t owe him,” I say. “Doesn’t mean he agrees.”
Rainer looks toward the car I’m working on, then back at me. He is quiet for a moment, working something over. “You talked to anyone?”
“I’m talking to you.”
“I mean someone qualified.”
He waits. He is very good at waiting.
I stare at my boots, at the crack in the concrete. Anywhere but him.
Rainer’s voice softens in that rough, particular way of his. “You came out alive. That matters, but alive isn’t the same as okay.”
“I don’t know how to be okay,” I say.
Rainer’s face changes. A shift around the eyes, something that opens slightly and then settles.
A breath leaves me, slow and uneven.
“She used to sit there,” I say.
Rainer doesn’t ask who. He knows.
I nod toward the old workbench by the side window. “Her boots up on the edge, mouth running, telling me I looked too pleased with myself for a guy fixing a car that had clearly lost the will to live.”
Rainer’s gaze follows mine across the workshop.
The workbench is empty now. Dust, tools, and a half-used roll of electrical tape, and nothing else. No girl with sharp eyes and soft hands, pretending she wasn’t paying attention when she was paying more attention than anyone.
“Have you seen her?” Rainer asks.
“No.”
“Do you want to?”
I laugh, but it comes out wrong. It’s broken at the edges and sounds more like something tearing than laughter. “That’s a stupid question.”
“Most important ones are.”
I rub the back of my neck and avert my gaze to the floor. “I don’t know.”
“That’s a lie.”
I peer up at him.
He looks back, unmoved and unhurried, waiting with that patience of his that has no bottom to it.
“Fine,” I say. “Yes. No. Fuck, I have no idea. I want to see her. Of course I want to see her. I have wanted to see her every goddamn day since I got locked up. Some nights inside, I wanted to hear her voice so badly I thought it would drive me out of my mind.”
The words rip through the air between us and keep going.
“Then I remember what I said to her. I remember her face when I made her believe she meant nothing to me. And I think maybe the only decent thing I have left to offer her is staying the fuck away.”
