"Right," I said. "Sorry. I'll leave you to it."
"No, it’s—I’m glad you came by." He said it and meant it, I could see that much. But the frequency was still off. He was standing three feet away from me and yet he was somewhere else entirely.
I didn't push.
We stood there for a minute in the small yard, the Tuesday sun coming over the roofline and the radio humming low through the open door. By any objective measure, it was fine. It was completely fine. And yet.
"I’ll see you Friday," I said.
"Friday," he said.
I walked back through the shop. Bellows was still at his bench, hunched over the same piece of hardware.
"Satisfied?" he asked, without looking up.
"With what?"
"Whatever you came to check on."
I looked at the back of his head. He didn't turn, just kept his eyes on the caliper like it held the secrets of the universe.
"Have a nice day, Bellows," I said.
"Don't tell me what to do," he muttered.
Outside on Millhaven Road, I stood with my coffee and the Tuesday sun and told myself it was nothing. A corner of a bay.
I believed it.
Mostly.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Jack
The bruise looked worse in the bathroom mirror than it had felt at the time.
I pressed a cold cloth to the bone, winced, and thought about what I'd told Maddie.Caught a corner. Wasn't paying attention.Both technically true, in the loosest possible interpretation of events. I had not been paying attention. I had been paying attention to the wrong thing entirely, which was the man in the waiting area who had started on my father and moved, with the confidence of someone who'd been saying things like this for forty years without consequence, to Cassie.
I'd kept it together on the father part. Just about. Frank Henley wasn't a man worth defending and I'd had a lifetime of practice at not engaging with people who thought otherwise. I'd kept my voice level and my hands on the car I was working on and I'd said, quietly, that he might want to wait outside.
Then he'd started on Cassie.
Not anything specific. Just the casual cruelty of a small town memory—always knew that family was trouble, shame about the girl, though you had to wonder. It was the kind of thing said without venom, which somehow made it worse. Like she was just a footnote. Like her whole life, Lily, the house on ClementStreet, all of it, was just something that had happened in the background of this man's Tuesday.
I'd set the wrench down.
I'd said, very carefully, that he needed to leave.
He hadn't.
Bellows had appeared in the doorway—some instinct, some radar the man had developed over forty years of running a garage—and taken in the situation in about two seconds.Time to go, he'd said, flat as he could, and the man had puffed up when he noticed he had an audience.
I'd stepped between them. I placed myself there, between Bellows and the problem, because Bellows had a bad back and a worse heart and wasn't going to take a punch on my account.
The man had taken a swing anyway.
It hadn't been much of one. More of a shove with intent, but it caught me on the jaw. I'd stepped back, held my hands up, and saidwe're done herein the same voice I used when a job was finished and it was time to move on. The man had left, muttering. Bellows had looked at me for a long moment.