Chapter 9 Walls
Wren decided to sell the garage.
It made sense on paper. She had a business of her own in Hollow Creek, a life that didn't include Iron Falls, and holding onto her father's shop meant either commuting an hour each way or uprooting everything she'd built.
Manny, her father's longesttenured mechanic, offered to buy it from her at a fair price, keep the other two employees on, keep the name.
The responsible choice. The clean choice.
She told herself it had nothing to do with keeping distance from Cain Ryker.
She almost believed herself, right up until the morning she went to sign the final paperwork and found herself sitting in her car outside the garage for twenty minutes, unable to make herself go inside, because some part of her recognized that selling the shop meant severing the one legitimate reason she had left to be in the same town as him.
Reyna called while she was still sitting there, some instinct for timing that Wren had come to rely on. "You're doing the face again," Reyna said, even though she couldn't possibly see her. "I can hear it in how you're breathing."
"I'm selling my dad's garage today.""Is that what's got you doing the face, or is it the other thing."Wren closed her eyes. "There is no other thing."
"Wren Calloway, I have known you for eight months and in that time you have never once lied to me about anything except how you're doing, so I'm going to go ahead and not believe you right now either.
" Reyna's voice softened. "You've been different since you got back from Iron Falls.
Quieter. Not sad-quiet like before. Thinking-quiet. "
"He apologized. Really apologized, not the letter kind.
" Wren's throat tightened. "I built this whole life specifically so I wouldn't have to figure out how I felt about him anymore, and now I'm sitting outside a garage I'm about to sell because some part of me doesn't want to lose the last excuse I have to still be near him. "
"Do you love him?"
The question landed harder than Wren expected.
"I never stopped," she admitted, quiet, like the words themselves were dangerous.
"I hate what he did. I hate it so much some days it feels like the only solid thing I have to stand on.
But underneath the hating, I never stopped loving him, and I don't know how to reconcile those two things being true at the same time. "
"Honey, they're both true at the same time all the time. That's what makes it hard. I'm not telling you to go back to him. I'm just telling you to stop pretending the feelings aren't there, because pretending's not working, and I think you know that better than anybody."
Wren went inside and told Manny she needed another week before she signed anything, and if he was surprised, he had the decency not to say so.
She thought about her father, too, walking back toward her car that afternoon, about the particular quality of his patience, how he'd never once told her what to do with her marriage, had simply kept showing up in Hollow Creek with a toolbox and a easy excuse about needing to check on some plumbing that never actually needed checking.
She understood, now, that he'd been giving her exactly what Reyna was giving her now, space to arrive at her own conclusions without anyone's thumb on the scale.
She drove back to Hollow Creek that evening with the radio off, turning the whole tangled question over one more time, and by the time she pulled into her own driveway she'd stopped trying to resolve it cleanly.
Some things, she was beginning to understand, didn't resolve.
They just got carried, a little more comfortably, the longer you stopped fighting the fact that you were carrying them at all.
She drove out to her father's grave before heading back to Hollow Creek that week, sat on the stillsettling earth with her knees pulled to her chest, and talked to him the way she hadn't quite let herself since the funeral.
"I don't know what you'd tell me to do, Daddy.
I don't know if you'd tell me anything at all, honestly, since you never did while you were here to ask.
" She pulled a stray weed from the grass at the edge of the plot.
"I think I'm starting to let him back in.
I think you'd probably just tell me to trust myself to know the difference between hope and foolishness.
I'm working on it. I promise I'm working on it. "
The wind moved through the old oaks overhead, and Wren sat there a while longer, feeling, without any particular certainty about whether it meant anything at all, a little less alone than she had in longer than she could easily remember.
She called Manny the next morning to formally tell him she wasn't selling, not yet, and found herself surprised by the relief in her own voice as she said it out loud. "I need more time to figure out what this looks like long term. But I'm not ready to let it go completely."
"Wasn't expecting you to," Manny said, with the particular satisfaction of a man who'd known Walter Calloway's daughter long enough to trust her instincts even when she didn't fully trust them herself. "Your daddy built something worth keeping. Glad you're giving yourself room to figure out how."
Wren hung up feeling lighter than she had in days, one uncertain question at least temporarily settled, even as the larger one, the question with Cain's name attached to it, remained stubbornly, achingly open.
That evening, back in Hollow Creek, Wren sat with a legal pad of her own, an old habit she hadn't realized she'd absorbed from watching Cain's careful accounting during his own recovery, and began sketching out, roughly, what keeping both businesses might actually look like.
Hiring a manager for the garage. Rearranging her own schedule to split time deliberately rather than reactively.
It wasn't a plan yet, not fully. But it was the shape of one, the first time in weeks she'd let herself imagine a future complicated enough to hold everything she actually wanted instead of simplifying her life down to whatever felt safest.
Cain, hearing about her decision to keep the garage through Manny rather than from Wren directly, felt a small, private surge of hope he was careful not to let show too visibly.
He understood, without needing to be told explicitly, that her choice to keep a piece of Iron Falls permanently in her life meant something larger than simple business logic.
It meant she was choosing, deliberately, not to fully close the door on the town, and by extension, not to fully close the door on him either, even if she wasn't ready to say so plainly yet.
Frank, when Wren eventually interviewed him for the manager position weeks later, would recall that first conversation about her father's shop as the moment he understood exactly what kind of owner she intended to be.
"You didn't ask me a single question about maximizing profit," he told her once he'd settled fully into the role.
"Every question was about keeping the crew steady, keeping the standards your daddy set.
Told me everything I needed to know about taking the job seriously. "
"That's what mattered to him," Wren said simply. "Figured it should matter to whoever ran it after him too.
The week Wren spent deciding, she found herself returning often to a memory from childhood, her father teaching her to ride a bike in the gravel lot behind the garage, his hand steady on the back of the seat long after she'd stopped needing it there, unwilling to let go until she herself gave the signal that she was ready.
She understood, turning the memory over, that he'd extended her exactly that same patience throughout her whole life, waiting for her own readiness rather than pushing his own timeline onto her decisions.
She wanted, deciding the garage's fate, to extend that same patience to herself now, refusing to let anyone else's timeline, not Manny's, not even her own anxious desire for resolution, rush a decision that deserved to be made at whatever pace actually served her best.
She thought about Cain's own careful accounting during those same weeks, the legal pad, the concrete list of changes, and understood that she was doing a quieter version of the same work herself, taking inventory of what she actually wanted to build rather than simply reacting to what fear told her to avoid.
The parallel comforted her more than she expected.
Whatever came next, she thought, they were at least each doing their own honest half of the labor, rather than leaving the whole weight of rebuilding to fall on just one of them.