Page 97 of Redline Baby

You'll see.

SOREN.

I didn't answer that one. I let her sit with it, mostly because I knew exactly what she was going to do with the information regardless of how much or how little I gave her, and there was no version of this where she didn't end up delighted and slightly insufferable about it either way.

Kit's quiet on the drive over, which is unusual enough that I glance at him twice at red lights.

"You okay?"

"Yeah. Just—" He picks at a loose thread on his jeans, an old nervous habit I've learned to read correctly by now. "This is your sister. And your niece. That's a whole different category of meeting people than Ni or the guys at Redline. And... I've never done this before, you know. Not with Charles or anybody."

"They're going to love you."

"You don't know that."

"I do, actually. I know both of them extremely well, and I know you extremely well, and I've done the math." At the next light, I reach over and rest my hand on his knee, feeling some of the tension ease beneath my palm. "You brought the guitar. That was your idea, not mine. Whatever instinct told you to do that, trust it."

"It's just sitting in the back. I didn't decide anything. You mentioned Rue liked music a week ago and I just... happened to bring it."

"Sure."

He huffs something that's almost a laugh, some of the nervousness cracking loose.

Maren's house is a squat little two-story on a cul-de-sac that hasn't changed in the fifteen years she's lived there. A tricycle lies abandoned on its side in the yard, and the wind chime hanging by the porch has been slightly out of tune since a storm bent one of the pipes two summers ago.

I've barely put the truck in park before the front door bangs open.

"UNCLE SOREN!"

Rue comes down the porch steps at a dead sprint, sneakers slapping against the concrete, and I catch her the same way I always do, scooping her up against my hip before she can build enough momentum to actually knock me over, which she's tried more than once.

"Whoa. Easy, menace."

"I made a picture of a submarine and it has a periscope that actually works if you fold it right and Mom said I could show you if you promise not to break it—"

"I promise."

"—and there's also—"

She stops midsentence, her whole attention snagging on Kit, who's climbed out of the passenger side and is standing a little awkwardly by the truck door, hands shoved into his jacket pockets, looking, for possibly the first time since I've known him, genuinely unsure what to do with his own body.

Rue squints at him with the unfiltered scrutiny only a six-year-old can deploy without any social consequences whatsoever.

"Who's that?" she asks.

Not to Kit.

To me.

Like he's a piece of unexpected shop equipment that's shown up without an invoice.

"This is Kit," I say. "He's my—"

"I'm his friend," Kit says quickly, at the exact same moment Maren appears in the doorway wiping her hands on a dish towel.

I feel the small omission land in my chest. Rue considers the information with the gravity of a judge reviewing evidence.

"Do you work at the shop?"