Chapter 9
NINE
POWELL
I was halfway through pretending to care about an equipment checklist when the bay doors opened and the temperature in the room changed.
You did this long enough, and you got a sixth sense for shift changes. The mood in the station, the tension in the air, the way voices rose and fell. This wasn’t a call coming in or Chief Holloway about to chew us out.
This was quieter. Sharper.
When I looked up, Jess Donnegan stood at the threshold like she’d walked into the wrong movie.
If I hadn’t been there the night of the fire, I might’ve thought she was fine. Her hair was pulled back into a neat braid that was far more sedate than her usual messy bun. Makeup on. Lip balm. Clean jeans. Boots that matched her coat. Everything about her said controlled, composed, I’ve got this.
Except her eyes.
Her eyes looked like someone had unplugged the lights behind them.
She took a breath, squared her shoulders, and pasted on a polite, neutral expression I’d never seen on her before. Not here. Not for me.
“Afternoon,” she said, voice level. “I’m looking for whoever can tell me what happened to my truck after… everything.”
Her gaze skimmed over Moose, Twitch, Hollywood. Skipped off me and came back like it didn’t have a choice.
I set down the incident report I’d been working on. “Hey, Jess.”
She dipped her chin, the bare minimum acknowledgment. “Powell.”
Up close I spotted the things she’d tried to hide—the fine tremor in her hands, tightness around her mouth, a faint shadow under one eye where smoke and oxygen and shock had all had their say.
But her spine was straight, her clothes were immaculate, and her tone had the precision of someone clinging hard to the last thing in her control.
“Chief’s in his office,” Moose offered from the workbench. “But Donkey here is the one you want.”
Jess’s jaw tightened at the nickname, but she didn’t take the bait. “Somebody moved Pour Decisions. I went by the site and…” She inhaled once, slow. “It’s gone. I’d like to know where it is. And what, if anything, can be salvaged.”
There it was. Not a quaver. Not a crack. Every word polished and professional, despite the fact we were talking about her entire life in the past tense.
I wiped my palms on my pants. “I can show you. We got it out of the way yesterday morning, moved it somewhere safer. It’s… not as bad as you’re probably imagining from the empty spot on Main.”
Her eyes snapped to mine, searching for something. A lie. Pity. Whatever she’d decided to expect from me.
“What aren’t you telling me?” she asked.
“Nothing.” For once it wasn’t totally bullshit. “We’ll have an easier time talking about it if I walk you through in person. It’s maybe fifteen minutes out of town. You okay to drive?”
Her mouth flattened. “I’ve been operating motor vehicles since the fire, yes.”
“I know,” I said quickly. “I just meant… if you’d rather ride with—”
“I’m fine,” she said, a little too fast. “Just tell me where we’re going.”
“Back to the old Cartwright farm.”
Something flickered in her gaze. Surprise, perhaps. “I can get there on my own.”
Ignoring the wall of armor that was back up, I grabbed my keys. “I’m going with you to walk you through it.”
For a second I thought she’d argue, but she only nodded once and strode back out like she hadn’t walked into a building full of people who’d been there when her world burned down.
Moose waited until the bay door thunked shut behind her before he said, “She’s got that murder-in-a-ballgown vibe today.”
I frowned. “What?”
“Like she’d stab a man and never smudge her lipstick,” he clarified. “You good, Donkey?”
No. “Fine. I’m just gonna…”
“Take the girl to tour her gutted truck?” Meatball supplied. “Real romantic.”
I shot him a look. “We’re trying to give her something to hold on to.”
“I know.” He held up his hands. “Remember, she’s one stiff breeze from snapping. Don’t push too hard.”
Like I didn’t know that already.
I kept my eyes on her in my rearview the whole drive.
The barn rose up ahead, big, vaguely red, and weathered, its huge double doors open to the yard because a parade of us had already been rotating through.
We’d strung temporary work lights inside, their glow spilling out onto the packed dirt.
The truck sat inside the threshold, the warped door open enough to reveal the hollowed out interior.
I pulled up off to the side, gave Jess room to park, and watched her face as she finally got a clear view.
She eased to a stop next to me. For a second, she only stared. Then she cut the engine, closed her eyes, and exhaled like she was about to walk into court.
By the time she joined me in front of the barn, her expression was back to neutral blankness.
“This is where you put it,” she said.
“Cartwright agreed to let us use the space. It’s empty this time of year. Dry. Close to town.”
She took a few more steps, boots crunching on the gravel. Her hand shook once when she reached out to touch the side of the Airstream, her fingers hovering a fraction of an inch from the metal. “It’s cold,” she murmured, like she’d expected the surface to still be hot.
“We let it cool before we moved it. Didn’t want to risk warping the frame any worse.”
Jess’s gaze slid to the open doorway. The inside was bare—no counters, no equipment, no storage bins or shelving.
Just scuffed aluminum walls with scorch shadows in the corners and some fresh aluminum panels someone had sourced from I had no idea where and wasn’t asking.
We’d quietly installed the replacements and hoped she wouldn’t notice.
Her breath hitched. “What did you do?”
“We gutted it.” No point softening that part. “Anything that was scorched, warped, or structurally compromised had to come out. Chief cleared us to take it apart here instead of at the yard so we could document everything for insurance. Easier for the adjuster to determine what’s what.”
She took that in, eyes moving slowly across the exposed interior. Recognition dawned as she mapped where everything had been—espresso machine here, grinder there, the little shelf where she kept the gingerbread syrup that made half the town feral in December.
“Who did it?” she asked. “You?”
“Me, yeah,” I said. “Moose. Meatball. Some of the other guys. Cartwright’s grandson loaned us some tools.”
Her jaw flexed. “Why.”
Not an accusation, exactly. Not gratitude either. A demand for an explanation she could live with.
The truth hovered on my tongue.
Because I couldn’t stand the idea of you seeing it black and broken.
Because taking it apart felt like the closest I could get to undoing the last forty-eight hours.
Because if I couldn’t stop the fire, I could at least give you a starting point.
Instead I shrugged, casual. “We had to open her up to check whether the frame was worth saving. It is, by the way. Structurally, she’s solid. She just needs… everything else.”
Jess let out a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Everything else,” she repeated. “Sure. No big deal. I’ll just pop down to the Home Depot coffee truck aisle and—”
She cut herself off, shoulders hitching.
I stepped closer but stayed just out of reach. “You’re not doing this alone.”
Her head turned sharply. “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” I said, slow and deliberate, “we’re going to help you rebuild.”
We.
The word came easy, and I hoped she heard the ring of truth.
Her brows rose. “We?”
“Me,” I clarified. “And the guys from the station. A couple of other folks. You’ve seen the fundraiser.”
Color climbed into her cheeks. “Yeah.” She sounded like the word tasted strange. “I’ve seen it.”
I thought of the number I’d seen last night before I forced myself to stop refreshing the page. It had kept climbing anyway.
“People want you back on Main Street. They want Pour Decisions. The fancy drinks. The caffeine. You.”
Her throat worked around a swallow. “They want their sugar and their espresso.”
“I’ve seen the comments,” I said quietly. “It’s more than that.”
She looked away fast, blinking hard.
I gave her a moment to collect herself. “Look, we’ve already started pulling some strings.
Meatball can handle rewiring the electrical to code.
Tyler’s cousin has a line on secondhand restaurant gear.
Chief okayed using us all as a workforce under the ‘community outreach’ umbrella.
Basically, all that’s missing is you and a plan. ”
She stared into the hollow truck. For a few seconds, all I heard was the wind and the distant lowing of one of Cartwright’s cows.
“This is… insane,” she said finally. “You realize that, right?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “But you make really good coffee. Seems worth a little insanity.”
That earned me a sideways look, the ghost of a glare. It didn’t quite land; her eyes were too shiny.
“What if I say no?” she asked. “What if I tell you this is too much, and I can’t pay you, and I can’t deal with having… people in my space, and I’m just done?”
My chest clenched. “Then we unhook it and haul it to the yard, and it rusts there like every other wreck that never made it back on the road.” I let the picture hang between us for a beat. “Is that what you want?”
She didn’t answer.
“What I want,” she said eventually, voice low, “is my truck exactly like it was, parked in its usual spot, with a line of people waiting and my staff bitching because the milk fridge is freezing things in the back again.”
“I can’t give you exactly like it was,” I said. “But we can get you close. Maybe better.”
She made a disbelieving noise. “Better.”
“More efficient layout,” I said. “Updated wiring. New equipment that doesn’t threaten to die every time you pull a double shot. Heat that doesn’t require a portable space heater.”
That got a tiny huff out of her. “That heater was perfectly fine.”
“It was a fire hazard.”
“It was not.” She sniffed. “It was… cozy.”
“Jess.” Somehow her name came out softer than I meant. “You don’t have to decide everything right now. Just… step inside. Check out what we’re working with.”
For a second I thought she might refuse on principle to prove she didn’t have to listen to me. But something in her posture loosened, almost imperceptibly, and she ducked under the doorway, careful not to brush the edge.
I followed her in.
The barn swallowed us up, muting the wind. The work lights we’d strung cast everything in a bright, clean white.
Inside the truck, the aluminum walls caught the light and reflected it back. Scorch marks ghosted the corners in irregular patches, but the main structure was sound. You could see the rivets. The seams. The places where things would go again.
Jess stood in the middle of the empty floor and turned slowly, taking in every side. Her boots scuffed the patched plywood where the counter supports had been. Her hand slid along the wall in an absent stroke, like she was petting a living thing.
Her voice, when it came, was small. “It’s so much bigger without everything in it.”
“Gives us options,” I said. “We can fix some of the pinch points. Move the power outlets. You always bang your hip on that corner by the grinder.”
She looked over her shoulder at me. “You noticed that?”
“I notice everything.” I winced internally. That sounded creepier out loud. “I mean—I drink a lot of coffee, and it’s hard to miss patterns.”
Her mouth quirked a little.
God, it felt good to see even the hint of a smile on her face.
“Okay,” she said quietly. “Say I let you help. Say I let… all of this happen. What’s the catch? What do you get out of it?”
The honest answer was you, maybe, eventually, if I’m very lucky, and you decide I’m not the villain you’ve made me out to be.
Out loud, I said, “I get my coffee truck back on the way to work. The guys get their morning orders. The town gets its Twelve Stops headliner. And I get to know I did something besides stand there and watch you lose everything.”
Her expression shifted on that last part. Softened.
“You didn’t just stand there,” she said. “You pulled me out.”
My throat got tight. “I’d do it again.”
She gave a sharp nod. Looked back at the walls. “You’re really serious about this.”
“Dead serious.”
“And you’re not going to let me pay you.”
“Labor?” I shook my head. “No. Materials, sure, if you insist. But the work? That’s on us. We volunteered.”
She closed her eyes briefly, like she was absorbing a hit. When she opened them again, they shone.
“This is…” She exhaled. “A lot, Powell.”
“I know,” I said. “Take your time.”
For a long moment, she stood in silence. I let her. No rush. No pressure. Only the two of us in the hollow echo of her future.
Finally, she scrubbed her palms over her thighs like she was wiping the decision onto denim.
“Fine.” The word didn’t have much bite. “We’ll… try it. I’m not promising I won’t freak out and change my mind.”
“Fair. We’ll take it one step at a time.”
Her gaze met mine fully then. Unshielded. Raw. “Thank you.”
Not grudging. Not passive-aggressive. Not forced.
Her gratitude landed right in the center of my chest like someone had lit a candle.
“You’re welcome,” I managed.
She glanced around the empty shell again, and for the first time since she’d walked into the station, there was something other than shock and numbness in her expression.
I saw the glimmer of a woman starting to make plans again.
“We’re going to need a layout,” she murmured, more to herself than to me. “And a list of essentials. And probably three different budgets—bare minimum, reasonable, and wild fantasy. And I need to talk to my staff. And vendors. And—”
I couldn’t help it. I smiled. “There she is.”
She shot me a look. “Don’t get smug. This doesn’t mean I suddenly like you.”
“I know. But you’re talking about the future. I’ll take it.”
Her mouth twitched.
“Come back tomorrow,” I said. “Bring your notebooks. We’ll go over what you want where. I’ll wrangle the guys for a work schedule.”
She hesitated. “You’re sure Cartwright is okay with this?”
“He’s thrilled there’s something going on in here besides his grandsons sneaking beer. You’re doing him a favor. Gives him something to supervise.”
That got me an actual, if tiny, huff of amusement. It warmed me from the inside out.
“All right,” she said softly. “Tomorrow.”
As we stepped back out of the truck and into the barn’s cool air, she paused beside me, one hand resting lightly on the frame.
“Powell?” she said.
“Yeah?”
“If this is some kind of elaborate setup so you can say ‘I told you so’ about the door latch,” she said, “I will run you over with this thing when it’s done.”
Relief loosened something in my chest. I grinned. “Noted.”
She huffed again, shook her head, and headed for her car.
I watched her go, metal glinting in the afternoon light behind us, a hollow shell waiting to be filled.
For the first time since we’d dragged Pour Decisions out here in the dark, I didn’t just see what had been lost.
I saw what might be.
And the fact that she’d trusted me—even a little—to help get her there?
That seemed like the first real win I’d had with Jess Donnegan in ten damn years.