Chapter 1 #2
We turn down a familiar street and my body knows it before my brain does. Something in my chest pulls tight. My breathing changes before I even see the garage.
It appears at the end of the block the way things appear in dreams.
The roller door is down. The sign still bolted above the entrance, sun-faded and worn at the edges but still there.
It’s brick and steel and oil stains soaked so deep into the concrete they’ve become part of the floor itself.
A busted roller door. A workbench buried under parts and years of hard work.
But it’s the closest thing to home I’ve ever had.
Rainer pulls into the driveway and kills the engine. The truck ticks as it settles. Heat pops under the hood. I stare through the windshield at the garage door.
Rainer gets out.
I don’t move.
My hand finds the door handle. My fingers curl around it, but they stop there, unable to close the gap between where I am and wherever the fuck comes next.
Rainer turns around and waits.
I push the door open and climb out.
My boots hit the concrete and the smell of oil and grease finds me before anything else does. It rises off the ground, off the walls, off the very air around this place, and it hits me somewhere behind the sternum with a force I wasn’t ready for.
For one suspended second, I’m not a twenty-five-year-old man with prison stamped into his bones and nothing waiting for him on the other side of it.
I’m eighteen. Elbows braced against the engine bay of that beat-up Dodge, hands black to the wrists, head down, focused, pretending I don’t notice Skylar walking through the workshop until the sound of her steps on the concrete makes it impossible.
I remember showing her how to find the bolt near the coolant line.
Covering her hand with mine, guiding it, telling her not to force it, to listen for the catch.
She leaned in closer than she needed to.
Her arm against mine. Bare skin and heat and that vanilla scent she always carried.
I remember the smear of grease on her cheek.
She never noticed it. And I stood there, wanting nothing more than to reach out and wipe it away.
Press my mouth to that exact spot. Feel her smart mouth go soft under mine, just once.
I blink hard, forcing the flood of memories back.
I clear my throat. “Smells the same.”
“Cleaned it yesterday,” Rainer says.
I drag in another breath, slower this time, letting the smell settle deep into my lungs and find all the old places it used to live.
Finding versions of me I am certain have been buried for good.
The boy with a burning need to prove he could build something from scratch.
The boy who worked until his hands bled because the work was the only thing that made sense.
The boy who saved every cent, who believed love could survive anything if you just held on hard enough.
He was so wrong about that last one.
Love is not for people like me, because you only hurt the ones you love.
Rainer nods toward the open roller door. “Come on.”
I follow him inside.
Light slants through the high windows, catching the dust in the air and turning it gold.
The radio’s on low somewhere, and a calendar on the wall is newer than the one I remember, a different year, a different girl, the same parts supplier who’s apparently been convinced for decades that a woman in tiny shorts is what makes a man choose brake pads.
Rainer stops and looks back at me. His eyes flick across my face once before he points toward the far bay.
“Your car is still there.”
I glance toward the far bay where he is pointing. A shape under a gray tarp.
I walk toward it. I reach the car and stop. The tarp is covered in dust. My fingers hover over the edge. Then I pull it back.
The dust rises in a cloud, catching the light, and I stare at the car beneath.
Rainer appears beside me.
“I did what needed to be done with the parts I had,” he says. “But I left most of it for you to finish. Figured you’d need something to work on when you got out.”
I look at him then.
This man had no reason to give a shit. Not one. He found me picking through his trash, and he knew what I was, and still he gave a shit anyway.
“Why?” I ask.
Rainer’s eyes narrow. “Why what?”
“All of it.”
I gesture around the garage because I don’t have the words for what I’m trying to say. There’s no clean way to point to seven years of quiet loyalty, to a car kept under a tarp, to a man who kept showing up to the visitation room until I finally said enough ugly things to make him stop.
“The visits,” I say. “The car. The room upstairs. All this. Me.”
Rainer looks at the car for a moment, then at the floor. His jaw shifts the way it always does when he’s figuring out how to say something he’s already decided on.
He nods toward the stairs at the back of the workshop. “Your old room is still upstairs.”
I go still.
“My old room,” I repeat, the words coming out flat. It’s not a question, but more like something I needed to hear again to believe.
“Yeah.” He still doesn’t look at me. “It’s still yours. Has been since the day—” He doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t need to. We both know what he’s referring to. “No one’s gone in there. Other than Skylar.”
The name hits me like a clenched fist.
I look at him.
“She stayed?” My voice comes out quieter than I mean it to.
“Yeah, she stayed here for a bit after—” He stops again, choosing his words carefully. “I told her she could stay as long as she needed.” His eyes stay on the car. “But it was too hard for her. Being here. I think you were everywhere in it.”
The breath I draw in doesn’t sit right in my chest.
I hurt her so badly, yet she still stayed long enough to try.
“She still comes by sometimes,” Rainer says. “Not as often as she did at first, but she still comes to see how I’m holding up.”
I drag the back of my hand across my jaw, stare at a fixed point on the concrete floor, and breathe.
Rainer watches me for a moment. Then he does what he’s always done, giving me the out.
“Welcome home, kid.” He pats me on the shoulder, then turns and walks toward his office.
I head for the stairs and, at the top, I stop outside the door. My hand rests on the handle, and I push it open.
The room hits me all at once.
The room is the same.
My clothes are still here, folded on the shelf with a precision that was never mine.
Stacked with that particular obsessive neatness Skylar carried everywhere she went, the kind you develop when you grow up in foster homes where if you don’t keep your shit together someone takes it.
She washed and folded them, then stacked them here, as if keeping something of me alive while I was rotting behind bars.
I can almost see her right here in the room, breathing the same stale air, sleeping in the same bed, folding my clothes as if it were something she could do for me when she couldn’t do anything else.
I don’t stay to dwell on it.
I pull my shirt off over my head, let it drop to the floor, and head to the bathroom.
The fluorescent tube hums to life, stuttering once before it catches, flooding the small space with that hard white light that makes everything look exactly as bad as it is—cracked tiles and rust bleeding down from the tap fittings in long brown streaks.
I reach in and twist the faucet.
When I step under the water, it’s too hot, and I don’t adjust it. I press one hand flat against the tile wall, bow my head, and let it burn. Across my shoulders. Down my spine. Into the muscle, bone, and all the spaces in between that have been cold for seven years.
I’ve lost everything that was ever worth a damn. And I walked away from most of it on purpose. Another mistake I’ve made. One I have to live with for the rest of my life.