Chapter 7 The Garage
Wren stayed in Iron Falls longer than planned, tangled in the grinding logistics of settling a dead man's affairs.
Her father had left her the house and garage outright, no complications, but thirty-one years of a life left behind a mountain of paperwork and three employees who needed to know if they still had jobs.
She was elbow-deep in a filing cabinet on a Thursday when she heard a bike pull up outside. She knew the sound before she saw him.
Cain came in through the open bay door, out of his cut for once, just jeans and a plain shirt, and stopped a respectful distance away when he saw her face.
"I'm not here to bother you. Manny called me.
Said the garage might need help figuring out the vendor accounts, said your dad ordered half his parts off handshakes instead of paperwork.
I've got a head for that kind of thing from running club finances.
Thought I could help, if you wanted it. If not, I'll leave. "
Wren looked at the mountain of paperwork on the workbench, then at him, weighing the offer against eight months of careful distance. She should have said no. She pulled out the second stool instead.
They worked in near silence for the first hour, Cain cross-referencing vendor names against invoices with the kind of quick competence that reminded her, uncomfortably, of exactly why she'd fallen for him.
He'd always been smarter than people expected from a man who rode a motorcycle and ran a club that scared half the town.
"Your dad ordered brake pads from three different suppliers," Cain said eventually, "and none of them are the cheapest option available.
I think he just liked the guys. Kept ordering from Denny over in Marsh County even though Denny's fifteen percent higher than the co-op, because Denny's wife had cancer a few years back and your dad wanted to keep sending him business. "
Wren felt her throat go tight. "That sounds like him."
"Best man I ever did business with. Never once made me feel like a criminal for the patch on my back the way half this town still does." Cain closed the ledger gently. "I mean that, Wren. Whatever else is true between us, I want you to know I meant every word I said at the funeral."
They kept working through the afternoon, and something about the shared, mundane task eroded some of the careful distance Wren had been maintaining.
Not trust, not yet. But something smaller and more manageable: the memory of what it had felt like to work alongside him, to exist in the same space without the air between them being purely combustible.
When the light started going gold through the bay door, Cain stood, stretched the stiffness out of his back, and looked at her carefully.
"I should go. I don't want to overstay whatever this was.
" He hesitated at the door. "For what it's worth, I'm proud of you.
Running your own shop over in Hollow Creek, building something from nothing.
I heard about it through the grapevine, same as everybody hears everything in this town.
I wanted to say it, since I've never gotten the chance.
"He left before she could respond, and Wren sat alone in her father's garage as the light faded, feeling the careful architecture of her anger developing its first genuine cracks, and hating, just a little, how much that scared her.
"Can I ask you something," Wren said, midway through the afternoon, surprising herself with the impulse. "Did you know? About the free repairs. The kindnesses in the ledger."
Cain looked up from the invoices, caught off guard. "I knew about my own truck. Didn't know he'd been keeping a record of doing it for other people too, going back decades apparently, from what I've seen you flipping through."
"He never told anyone. Just did it and moved on.
" Wren traced a finger along the edge of the old leather cover, still sitting open on the desk between them.
"I keep thinking about what it means, that he extended that kind of grace to you specifically, during the worst months, when he had every reason not to. "
"I think about it too," Cain admitted, setting down his pen.
"More than I probably should. I paid what I thought was a fair bill for that transmission work and never once suspected he'd waived it.
Wish I'd known while he was alive. I would have thanked him properly instead of just handing over cash and driving off like nothing had happened. "
"I don't think he wanted thanks. I think that was the whole point of keeping it private.
" Wren closed the ledger carefully, the old spine creaking.
"I used to think I understood exactly the kind of man my father was.
Going through all this, I'm realizing there was a whole private register of him I never got to see while he was alive.
Makes the grief different somehow. Wider. "
Cain didn't offer anything else, just let the silence hold what it needed to hold, and Wren found herself grateful, in that moment, for a man who'd learned somewhere along the way not to fill every quiet space with something meant to fix it.
"Can I ask you something else," Wren said, near the end of that first afternoon together, surprising herself with the impulse to keep the conversation going a little longer than the ledger strictly required. "Do you think he ever forgave you? Fully, I mean. Before he died."
Cain considered the question with real care.
"I don't know if forgiveness is the right word for what your dad offered me.
I think he just decided, somewhere along the way, that judgment wasn't his job.
He extended fairness because fairness was who he was, not because I'd earned it back through any particular effort on my part.
I used to find that confusing, honestly.
Now I think it might be the most generous thing anybody's ever done for me, letting me keep showing up without demanding I prove myself first."
"That sounds like him," Wren said softly, and felt, for the first time since the funeral, something like comfort settle alongside the grief.
Manny caught Cain on his way out that first afternoon, pulling him aside near the garage's back door.
"Appreciate you helping her with this. Whatever else is true between you two, this business needed the help, and you gave it without asking anything back.
Wanted you to know that got noticed.""Wasn't looking for it to get noticed. "
"I know. That's exactly why it did." Manny clapped him on the shoulder, the particular gruff approval of an older man who'd spent three decades reading character in how people treated a struggling business during hard times.
"Her daddy would've appreciated it too, I think, seeing you show up for the unglamorous work instead of just the grand gestures. "
Cain carried that assessment with him for days afterward, turning it over, understanding it as one more small, unexpected piece of evidence that the work he was doing, quiet and unglamorous as it often felt, wasn't going entirely unwitnessed after all.
That evening, after Cain left, Wren found herself calling her mother for the first time in weeks, needing to talk through the strange, unsettling comfort of the afternoon's work.
"I don't know what to do with how easy it was, being around him again," she admitted.
"I keep waiting for the old anger to reassert itself and it just... doesn't, not the way I expect it to."
"Maybe that's not a bad thing, sweetheart," her mother said carefully.
"Maybe that's just what healing looks like when it's actually working instead of just being talked about.
Doesn't mean you have to decide anything yet.
Just means you're allowed to notice what you're noticing, without immediately building a case against yourself for noticing it. "
Wren turned that over long after the call ended, grateful for a voice from outside the whole tangled situation, offering perspective uncomplicated by proximity to any of it.Wren found herself, in the days after that first afternoon of vendor accounts, thinking about her father's particular gift for reading people accurately, the way he'd always seemed to know exactly who deserved a second chance and who didn't, extending grace with a precision that never felt naive or foolish.
She wondered, watching Cain's careful, competent work across the desk from her, whether her own instincts about him were similarly reliable, or whether eight months of grief and loneliness had simply worn down her ability to judge clearly.
She didn't reach a conclusion that afternoon.
She simply noted the question, and carried it forward, understanding that some answers only revealed themselves with time rather than immediate certainty.