The workshop seems to shrink around her, the walls pulling in, the space recalibrating itself as it always did with Skylar.
I move to the workbench because I need something to do with my hands before my brain has authorized a decision. I pick up a rag and drag it over a smear of grease that does not need wiping.
Skylar walks slowly around the front of the car, her fingers trailing along the fender.
I track every inch of her movement. She stops close enough that I catch her scent, and my body reacts before my head has the sense to intervene. Every nerve I have sparks awake at once, as if it has been sitting in the dark, waiting for this exact second since the day I walked out of that visiting room and did not look back.
I lean against the bench, cross my arms, and look at her, because looking at her is both the worst thing I can do right now and completely non-negotiable.
“What are you doing with yourself?” I say. “Work.”
Something happens to her face. A quiet lighting up, something she is proud of and has earned the right to be.
“I work at a nonprofit,” she says. “New Ground. We support foster youth who are aging out. Case management, advocacy, court support.” She pauses. “I’m a senior youth advocate.”
I stare at her. “We could have used something like that back in the day.”
She tips her chin up slightly, that old gesture, the one that signals she is waiting to be underestimated and is fully prepared to handle it. “I started at nineteen. Patricia hired me before I graduated from Community College. She said my lived experience was the qualification.”
“She was right.”
I look at her standing here in this workshop under these lights, and I feel something move through me, made of pride and grief in equal measure. Two things that have no business coexisting, but they do.
She did all of that.
Of course, my girl became exactly that. With everything she was handed—every shitty house, every dead-eyed adult, and every system built to process her rather than see her—she stood up and turned her own trauma into something that kept other kids from drowning in theirs. I don’t know why it surprises me, and I don’t know why it is currently destroying me.
I did the right thing. I know that now, looking at the woman she became. I made myself into something she needed to leave behind so she could build this, and that is the right outcome no matter what it cost.
However, it doesn’t stop my chest from feeling like it’s being torn apart.
“I’m glad,” I say. “That you did that. That you got there.” I swallow. “I’m so proud of you, Sky.”
Her eyes fill with tears. She doesn’t let them spill. She holds them back, that controlled stillness of a woman who has spent her whole life learning not to cry in front of people.
I drag a hand over my jaw. “Shit. I didn’t mean to.”
“I know,” she says quietly.
Her eyes hold mine.
The room feels smaller.
Everything narrows to her face and the careful, bruised way she is looking at me. I watch the fight in it, the push and pull of everything she is not saying moving just beneath the surface.
“I’m sorry,” I say, the words coming out before I can dress them up or pull them back. It’s raw, unadorned, and about seven years too late.
Her whole body stills. That brief, involuntary pause of someone who has just heard something they were not prepared for and is deciding in real time what to do with it.
The old me would make a joke right now. Say something filthy. Hide behind my mouth because it was always easier than standing still while the truth took pieces out of me. But Rainer’s voice sits somewhere in the back of my head, quiet and certain.Start with sorry.
So I do.
“For what I said to you,” I add.
Her face tightens. She knows exactly what I’m talking about. That memory still has its teeth, and we both carry the marks it left.
I force myself to keep going because if I stop now, I will turn coward again, and I have been a coward about this for long enough.
