CHAPTER 18 SHAWN—BUILDING SOMETHING
Two days pass without incident. The garage idea from before hasn't come up again, not directly, but Shawn's been turning it over ever since, the way you turn over anything that starts to feel less like a maybe and more like a plan.
"You serious about the shop thing," Shawn says one evening, breaking a silence that had gone on long enough to feel comfortable instead of careful. "Or was that just talk."
Jorge looks up from nothing in particular. "Wasn't just talk."
"Then let's actually talk about it. For real this time."
Something shifts in Jorge's face, careful optimism instead of the guarded blankness Shawn's used to. "Okay. For real."
"What's it need? The shop. To get back up and running."
"Hands, mostly. Time. Money's tight but not impossible—got some saved, and the building's paid off, just sitting there costing me in ways that don't show up on paper.
" Jorge counts it off like he's been doing this math longer than tonight.
"Need somebody who'll actually learn the work instead of clocking hours till something better comes along. "
"That's me."
"That's the idea, yeah."
Shawn sits up straighter, something lighting in his chest that he hasn't let himself feel in longer than he can remember. "What would I even be doing? Specifically."
"Depends how fast you pick things up. Start you on basics—brake jobs, suspension work, nothing that'll get somebody killed if you mess it up first try.
Hydraulics is its own animal. Takes longer to trust somebody with a full install.
" Jorge's voice picks up pace now, more words in a row than Shawn's heard out of him most nights combined.
"But you already read a lift kit spread like you understood half of it without anybody teaching you. That's not nothing."
"So I'd be an apprentice."
"You'd be whatever you make yourself into. I'm not running a charity. You slack, you're out, same as anybody." Jorge's mouth almost curves at that, closest thing to a joke he's offered in days. "But you don't strike me as somebody who slacks when it's something you actually want."
"Never had anything worth not slacking for before."
The admission sits heavy a second, more honest than either of them planned for tonight.
"You'd have it now," Jorge says, quiet.
Shawn doesn't answer that directly. Doesn't trust his voice enough to try. Instead: "What's the shop even called?"
"Delgado Hydraulics. Not creative. Never needed to be—name did the work on its own once people knew it."
"Might need a paint job on the sign. Been sitting empty a while."
"Might need a lot of things." Jorge looks over at him, something steady and real in his face that Shawn hasn't seen aimed at him before, not like this. "Figure we'll find out what, once we're both actually standing in front of it instead of just talking about it in here."
"You keep saying 'we' like it's decided."
"Maybe it is." Jorge shrugs, like the admission costs him less every time he makes it. "Maybe I decided somewhere around the laundry thing, and I'm just now getting around to saying it out loud."
Shawn doesn't say anything for a while after that. Just sits with it, the shape of an actual future instead of a countdown to sentencing, something he hasn't let himself imagine in longer than he'd admit to anybody, maybe including himself.
"Twenty years is still on the table," Shawn says eventually, quieter. "Case that bad doesn't just disappear because we made a plan."
"I know that."
"So what happens to the plan if I don't get out?"
Jorge's jaw tightens, something hard and certain moving behind his eyes. "Then I keep the door open till you do."
Shawn looks at him a long moment, throat tight, and doesn't trust himself to answer that with anything but silence.
Down the tier, a cart rattles past, somebody's commissary running late this week, and the ordinary sound of it feels almost strange against the size of what just got said in this cell.
Neither of them mentions the flashlight again.
But Shawn falls asleep that night thinking about paint on a sign instead of a number on a docket, and for the first stretch of hours since he got picked up, that's enough to hold the fear back.