EPILOGUE HOTWIRED
Two years out, and the sign above the roll gate reads DELGADO HYDRAULICS in fresh paint, no rust bleeding through the letters anymore.
Inside, the shop runs loud most mornings, compressor whine and impact wrenches and somebody's radio turned up too high, same chaos it always used to be before everything fell apart, except now there's a second set of hands who knows the place as well as Jorge does.
Shawn's under a Cadillac when the bell over the door rings, voice calling out before he even rolls the creeper clear. "If that's the parts guy, tell him he's late again."
"It's not the parts guy."
Shawn slides out, wipes his hands on a rag that used to be white, and finds Jorge leaning in the doorway with two coffees and an expression that still, after two years, makes something in Shawn's chest go warm and stupid.
"You bring me one of those or just torturing me with it?"
"Depends how the switch panel's coming on the Monte Carlo."
"Perfect. Obviously." Shawn takes the cup anyway, grinning. "Told the customer three days. We're at day two. I'm a professional."
"You're something."
Jorge says it dry, but there's nothing sharp underneath it anymore, none of the old coiled tension that used to live behind every word he handed anybody.
Two years of steady work, steady mornings, steady everything, and it shows in the ease of his shoulders, the way his hands stay loose at his sides even when a customer's late on payment or a supplier ships the wrong part twice in a row.
He still has a temper. Shawn's seen it flare, once or twice, quick and hot over something that mattered—a kid who tried lifting parts off the shelf without paying, a guy running his mouth about the neighborhood.
But it comes and goes now instead of festering, spends itself and settles, no longer the kind of thing either of them has to brace for like weather.
"Marisol's coming by later," Jorge says, settling onto a stool near the workbench. "Bringing the kids. Wants to see the Regal finished."
"It's been finished for a year."
"Tell her that."
Shawn laughs, goes back to the Cadillac's wiring, hands moving sure and practiced over work that used to be foreign to him and now feels like the only thing he was ever supposed to be doing.
Licensed now, certified, a business card with his own name on it sitting in a drawer he still can't quite believe is real some mornings.
Nobody in this shop calls him a car thief anymore. Nobody remembers to, mostly, except the two of them, and even that memory's softened into something almost fond, a story they tell each other sometimes late at night instead of a wound either one's still nursing.
"You ever think about it," Shawn asks, not looking up from the wiring. "Where we'd be if that magazine hadn't been on the cart that day."
Jorge's quiet a moment, turning the coffee cup in his hands. "Think about it sometimes. Don't like where it goes."
"Yeah."
"You'd have done your time somewhere else. I'd have done mine somewhere else." Jorge's voice stays even, but something underneath it doesn't. "Don't figure either of us comes out the other side of that as good as we did coming out of it together."
Shawn sets the wiring down; looks over at him properly. "That's about as close as you get to sentimental, huh."
"Don't get used to it."
"Wouldn't dream of it."
But he crosses the shop floor anyway, presses a kiss to Jorge's temple, quick and easy, the kind of thing that would've gotten them both a write-up two years ago and now just gets them a customer clearing their throat awkwardly by the parts counter.
Jorge doesn't pull away. Hasn't pulled away from anything like that in a long time.
Some nights, closing up, Jorge stands in the doorway watching the Regal catch the last of the light, and thinks about a man who taught him everything he knows about hydraulics and never got to see what came after.
Thinks Rubén would've liked Shawn, probably.
Would've given him hell about the Impala thing, same as everybody else, and would've meant it as the highest compliment he knew how to give.
Grief doesn't leave. Jorge's stopped expecting it to. But it sits different now, worn smooth at the edges instead of sharp enough to cut, folded into the shop's rhythm instead of standing outside it demanding to be fed.
Shawn locks up most nights now, same routine, same two cars left in the lot until they're both ready to head home together.
Some things about him never fully changed—quick hands, restless energy, an old instinct for reading a room fast that used to keep him alive on the street and now just makes him good at spotting a customer trying to talk his price down.
But the wiring under the hood belongs to him now, fully, legally, nothing left to hotwire that isn't already his to touch.
Two men, hotwired long before they ever met—Shawn by a childhood that handed him the wrong trade for the wrong reasons, Jorge by a grief that turned his hands into something he didn't trust for years after Rubén died.
Neither one chose the spark that finally connected them.
Both of them, somehow, ended up exactly where the wiring was always supposed to lead.
The gate comes down at six. The lights go out one circuit at a time, same as they always have.
And every morning, the gate goes back up.