8. Riley
Riley
September heat rolled through the open loading bays and settled over Copper Shank like another layer of shop grime.
Riley stood beside the leather skiving machine, wiping grease from the casing where she had spent the morning replacing a worn feed roller.
Her pregnancy showed beneath the canvas apron now.
The repair held, and the blade tracked clean across Mac’s test strip.
Maisie sat on a stool near the bay door, one sneaker hooked around a lower rung while she scrolled through her phone. “You know Mac already signed off on that thing, right? You can stop polishing it like he’s coming back with a white glove.”
“There’s still grease under the guard.” Riley dragged the rag along the seam and held it up. “See?”
“I see a woman who has been on her feet since seven.”
“I see an apprentice on break who has enough energy to critique my cleaning technique.”
Maisie grinned and tipped the phone against her knee. “Fair. Want the degreaser?”
“Leave it. I’m almost done.”
Leather cement hung in the air beneath the hotter bite of solvent. Beyond the doors, a delivery truck idled near the gravel lane, its diesel engine adding a low grind to the press-room noise. Riley shifted her stance and reached for the last greasy streak along the side panel.
The baby kicked hard enough to stop her hand mid-wipe. The rag slipped from her fingers and landed beside her boot while she pressed her palm to her side.
Maisie’s phone dropped to her lap. “Holy crap. Gymnastics again? Because you just flinched hard enough to drop your rag.”
Riley laughed and waited, hand still over the spot. Another movement followed, smaller this time, but impossible to mistake.
“Definitely awake,” she said. “I’m pretty sure she despises the grind of that diesel engine just as much as her mother does.”
“Flawless taste already.”
Riley bent to retrieve the rag, slower than she would have moved a few months ago. Ten-hour shifts on concrete had taught her where her limits lived, even if admitting those limits irritated her. She wiped the last smear from the machine and set the rag on the workbench.
Maisie watched her. “You want me to finish the cleanup?”
“No. You want me to stop treating pregnancy like a temporary disability?”
“I want you to stop pretending September in this shop isn’t trying to cook you alive.”
That earned a laugh. Riley loosened the front of her apron and tugged the fabric away from her body, inviting what little air moved through the bay.
Months ago, she had arrived at Copper Shank with a purse, a positive test, and no plan beyond staying gone.
Now the shop had her tools, a loft upstairs, and people who noticed when she needed water without making her ask twice.
The baby nudged again beneath her hand. We’re safe here now. No arena glass. No handlers deciding where she belonged. No cameras waiting to turn her marriage into background scenery. Just machinery, sweat, leather dust, and a daughter already objecting to diesel noise.
Maisie picked up her phone again. “Hey, there’s a fresh bottle of that cooling peppermint lotion sitting by the front register for you.”
Riley glanced toward the storefront, then back at the machine. “You just saved my life.”
“I know. Try to remember that when Mac makes me inventory the hardware bins.”
“I’ll put in a good word.” Riley wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. “I’m sweating off my top layer of skin in this heat.”
The whine of a high-performance engine cut across the workshop before Riley could head for the peppermint lotion. It swallowed the diesel idle outside, climbed over the press-room noise, and sent two cutters near the loading doors turning toward the gravel lot.
Maisie lowered her phone. “That better not be another supplier trying to back into Wade’s freight lane.”
Riley picked up the rag and set it against the skiver casing. “If it is, Mac can yell at them. I’m off loading-bay traffic control until this line is clean.”
“You say that like you didn’t spend half of Tuesday directing a box truck by hand.”
“Because the driver was about to take out the corner post.”
The engine climbed once more, then dropped as a black Aston Martin rolled into the lot. Sunlight flashed across the windshield. Gravel spat beneath the tires as the car angled toward the open bays and stopped far too close to the work area.
A cutter near the leather racks stopped mid-sentence. Riley knew that car.
For a moment, her hand stayed where it was, rag pressed flat against the metal. Months had passed since she had watched that same car disappear from the life she used to occupy. She had built enough routine here that its engine no longer existed in the background of every day.
Apparently the divorce petition had finished the job.
So the papers finally reached you.
She dragged the rag across metal she had already wiped clean.
Maisie pushed off the stool and squinted toward the lot. Her phone remained in one hand. “Unless a pack of country club tourists took a serious wrong turn, that car has no business being parked in our gravel.”
“That would be Graham.”
Maisie turned toward her, knocking the stool sideways with her calf. “Graham as in Graham Delaney?”
Riley folded the rag once and worked along the machine’s side panel. “There aren’t many other Grahams driving that car.”
“The actual MVP is sitting outside our shop?”
“That appears to be what’s happening.”
Maisie stared through the bay doors. “Why?”
Riley found another streak of grease near the guard and wiped it away. Months of silence had not brought him south. The wedding ring left on his bench had not brought him south. Every conversation he had postponed until later had eventually run out of later.
Legal paperwork had managed to interrupt his calendar.
“Damage control,” Riley said.
Maisie looked back at her. “You sound like you’re talking about a leaking pipe.”
“It’s more useful than talking about him like he’s royalty.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You called him the actual MVP.”
“That was surprise, not worship.”
Riley almost smiled, but the sound of the idling Aston Martin drew her eyes back toward the doors.
Its expensive paint was already gathering Georgia dust. Copper Shank ran on scarred benches, grease-stained tools, repair orders, and people who showed up when a machine failed.
The car looked like an advertisement pasted over the wrong picture.
Maisie shifted her phone to her other hand. “Do you want me to get Mac?”
“No.”
“Wade?”
“No. They’re working.”
“Then what do you want me to do?”
Riley tossed the rag onto the bench and tested the machine guard with her thumb. It held. The line still had work stacked for the afternoon, and Graham’s arrival did not change a single order ticket.
“Keep your eyes on the workbench, Maisie—Mac wants this line moving by the afternoon shift, and I’m not stopping my clock for him.”
The driver’s door opened before Maisie could answer.
“He’s getting out.”
Riley reached for a clean shop towel. “Stay here, Maisie. Let me deal with him.”
Graham stepped into the September heat with a stack of papers crushed in one hand.
Whatever polish the sports car carried had not survived the drive.
His clothes sat wrong across his shoulders, his hair looked as if he had dragged his hands through it for hours, and the skin beneath his eyes carried the worn look of a man who had missed more than one decent night of sleep.
He shut the door and started across the gravel.
His shoes scraped through the loose stone with every step. The shop had gone quieter behind Riley, not silent, but still enough that smaller noises stood out against the machinery: a tool placed on a bench, a chair leg dragging, the faint idle of the Aston Martin outside.
Graham kept coming.
“Riley.”
She wiped grease from one palm, then the other. The towel caught in the crease beside her thumb, and she worked at the spot until the stain faded.
“Riley, please.”
The word please almost made her laugh. Months ago, she had begged him to stop in a hotel room and finish one conversation before walking after Nicolle. He had kissed her cheek, checked his watch, and left anyway.
Now he had driven south with her divorce petition wrinkled in his hand.
Riley tossed the towel beside the rag and turned toward him.
His next step never landed.
Graham stood about ten feet from the loading bay, one shoe planted forward in the gravel. His attention dropped from her face to the curve beneath her apron.
The papers bent further in his grip.
For several seconds, he said nothing. Riley did not help him.
There it is.
Not satisfaction. Not revenge. Just proof.
He had spent the summer somewhere else, living inside whatever schedule had seemed important enough to justify months of silence. Meanwhile, their daughter had grown large enough to kick hard against Riley’s side during a shift.
Graham looked back up at her.
“You’re pregnant…” His voice came out rough. “Riley, why the hell wouldn’t you say anything?”
“My medical status isn’t your business, Graham.” She kept her hands loose at her sides. “We ran out of things to discuss months ago.”
He looked back at her stomach before meeting her eyes again. “That’s my child.”
Riley said nothing.
He took one step closer. “You serve me divorce papers out of nowhere and hide the fact that you’re carrying my child, Riley?”
“Out of nowhere?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, Graham. I don’t think I do.”
The petition shook as he gestured. “I thought you needed space. I thought you were angry and you were going to cool off. Then this shows up, and now I get here and find out—” He reached for her stomach, then stopped short. “How long were you planning to keep this from me?”
Riley stared at the papers instead of the hand.
There it was again. His version of their marriage, where her absence had been a temporary mood and his silence had somehow counted as patience.
“Did you honestly believe I didn’t have the right to know?” he asked.
“You had months to wonder where I went.”