He walks to the workbench and picks up the wrench I threw earlier. He turns it once in his hand, considers it, then sets it down with far more care than I gave it.
“You made a choice in prison,” he says.
“Yeah.” My jaw tightens. “A shitty one.”
“Maybe. You were eighteen, scared and locked up, trying to protect someone with the only tools you had.”
“My tools were cruelty and stupidity.”
“Most eighteen-year-old boys only have those two,” he says.
“That supposed to make me feel better?”
“No.” He says it simply, without apology. “It’s supposed to make you stop carrying it like a grown man with clean choices made it.”
“I knew what I was saying,” I say. “When I said it to her. I understood exactly what I was saying.”
“I know.”
“I meant to hurt her.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“She trusted me.” My voice drops low, scraping the bottom of something. “And I broke that.”
“Yes,” Rainer says.
One word.
It’s exactly what the truth sounds like when someone respects you enough not to soften it. That’s Rainer. He will give you shelter but he will not hand you bullshit and call it mercy.
I nod. “Then what the fuck do I do with that?”
Rainer leans back against the workbench and crosses his arms. “You live with it. And if you get the chance, you tell her the truth about why you did it so she can get on with her life.”
“She might not give me the chance.”
“Then you respect that.”
“And if she does?”
He holds my gaze across the workshop, steady and certain. “Then you don’t waste it with excuses. You tell her what you did. You tell her why. You tell her you were wrong.” He pauses. “Then you shut up and let her feel whatever she needs to feel.”
The workshop settles around his words.
I look at the empty workbench, the dust, the tools, and the absence of her. Then I move over to where Rainer stands, pick up the wrench, turn back to the car, and get back to work.
Chapter 8
Skylar
For the past four days I’ve stayed at Cassie’s apartment and my body is slowly starting to remember what life feels like again.
Not the curated version.
Not the one people perform for the world with their highlight reels, and carefully angled photographs meant to signal that they have their shit together. This is not that.
This is Cassie’s bra hanging over the back of the kitchen chair because she maintains—with genuine philosophical conviction—that laundry baskets are capitalist cages. Two mugs in the sink, tea stains around the rims, because neither of us has ever possessed the spiritual fortitude to wash dishes before caffeine. The yellow throw blanket half-dragged off the couch, where I fell asleep last night with one foot hanging off the edge and my neckat an angle I am still feeling this morning. Cassie’s record player is still spinning quietly in the corner. The needle long past the last track, just turning in that soft, patient loop the way it always does when we forget to lift it.
