Rainer’s Custom Restorations sits at the end of the block, the sign slightly crooked, as it has always been. The roller door is halfway up, spilling warm yellow light across the concrete out front.
I pull up in front of the garage.
The car idles. I don’t turn it off, just simply sit with both hands glued to the wheel, eyes fixed on the building.
Zane is probably in there right now.
Not the boy from my memory, frozen at eighteen, leaning in doorframes with busted knuckles.
“He’s quieter now,” Cassie told me. “Hotter, too. Not that you asked.”
I grip the wheel until my fingers ache.
For seven years, I have replayed this moment of seeing him again in my head.
In some versions, I hit him. In others, I scream at him. And sometimes I hate myself for letting him put his hands on my face and love me the way he used to.
In none of those versions did I sit frozen in a parked car outside Rainer’s workshop like a coward, my heart trying to beat its way out of my chest.
Every nerve in my body wants to see him. That is the most honest sentence I have said in months, and it costs me something real to let it stand without immediately burying it beneath the carefully maintained fiction that I have moved on.
“Get out,” my mind whispers.
My hand loosens from the wheel for a second, then tightens again.
What if I walk through that roller door and the man inside really did kill the boy who loved me?
What if I look at his face and find a stranger wearing familiar features, and I have to grieve him all over again?
My throat closes around the thought.
I am twenty-six years old, newly homeless by choice, emotionally bruised by a man I never loved enough, and still, after everything, undone by the one person I let myself love too much.
Chapter 9
Zane
Acar pulls up out front, and every muscle in my body goes still. The sound of tires on gravel rolls through the workshop’s half-open roller door. An engine idles for a second before cutting off. Silence follows.
Rainer is out on a tow a few hundred miles from town, hauling some poor bastard’s car off the shoulder after it gave up on life near the interstate. He left an hour ago and told me not to burn the place down before he ducked under the roller door and took the truck.
My first thought is Griff.
Trouble has always had excellent timing and terrible manners.
I set the wrench down and wipe my hands on the rag hanging from my back pocket as footsteps sound outside.
Light. Careful. Not Griff’s heavy tread. Probably just a customer needing something looked at. I move toward the roller door and stop the moment someone ducks under it and stands upright.
And there she is.
Skylar.
For one full second, the air leaves the room.
The dust stops moving.
The traffic outside goes quiet.
