CHAPTER 2
The Wrenhouse
°°°
Rhys Cade had learned to read a room the way other men read a gauge — instinct first, numbers second — and the room he was reading right now was one person and forty square feet of office behind the garage bay, and the instrument telling him something was badly wrong was his own pulse.
She'd texted the address at nine that morning.
Not a place, exactly — the address of the office at The Wrenhouse itself, which meant she was coming to the property they still jointly owned instead of asking him to come to her, which meant something, though he couldn't decide yet if it was a good something or the kind of something that was really just Emery being careful with herself the way she'd learned to be careful with herself around him.
He'd cleaned the office. Actually cleaned it — not the half-assed sweep he usually gave it before a supplier visit, but really cleaned it, wiped down the desk he never used because he did all his real work standing up in the bay, straightened the certificate on the wall that said the garage was licensed to do the kind of state inspections that kept the club's above-board business exactly that, above board.
He'd told himself he was doing it because a title company might need to see the place eventually. He knew that wasn't why.
He'd also, at six that morning, driven to the bakery on Fifth that used to be her Saturday habit and bought two coffees he had no intention of admitting he'd bought, black with a splash for her, too much sugar for himself, and then thrown them both out an hour later in the bay's trash can when he realized how it would look — like he'd been waiting for her, planning for her, assuming something about this meeting that he had no right to assume.
He was thirty-eight years old and he'd just poured out four dollars of coffee like a teenager erasing evidence, and the fact that he could laugh at himself for it, standing alone in the garage at six-thirty in the morning, didn't make it feel any less true.
The bell on the shop door — different bell than her shop's, deeper, older, hung there since before either of them owned the place — went off at eleven on the dot, and he was out from behind the desk and into the bay before he'd consciously decided to move.
She looked good. That was the first thing, the unfair thing, the thing he had no right to notice and noticed anyway — she'd cut her hair sometime in the last eleven months, not dramatically, just shorter, framing her face different, and she was wearing the kind of clothes that told him she'd come straight from the shop, canvas apron folded over one arm like she hadn't decided whether she'd be staying long enough to need it back on.
"Em." Her name came out rougher than he meant it to.
"Rhys." She didn't come further into the bay than she had to.
Stood just inside the door with the manila folder held in front of her like a shield, and he made himself notice that too — not just that she was here, but how she was standing, feet planted, shoulders squared, the posture of a woman who'd rehearsed this on the drive over.
"You want to sit? I cleaned off the desk." As soon as he said it he heard how it sounded — like he'd been expecting her, hoping for her, and the flicker across her face told him she'd heard it too.
"I'm fine standing." A beat. "This won't take long."
He'd rehearsed this too, in his own way — not in the mirror, he wasn't built for that, but on the ride over from the clubhouse, running through everything he wanted to say and discarding most of it before he'd even parked.
Don't apologize, not here, not like this, not as a bargaining chip attached to a signature she needed.
Don't make this about anything but the deed.
He'd made himself that promise on the highway with the wind loud enough to drown out the part of him that wanted to break it the second she walked through the door.
It took forty minutes, which by her own definition wasn't long, but felt to Rhys like the longest forty minutes of the eleven months that had preceded it.
She laid it out clean and businesslike, the way she'd probably practiced saying it to herself in the mirror — the second location, the financing, the deed of trust, the six-week window — and he listened to every word of it while some ungovernable part of his attention kept snagging on smaller things.
The chip in her thumbnail polish. The way she still tucked hair behind her left ear with her middle finger instead of her index, a habit he used to tease her about because nobody did it that way, and she used to tell him nobody was her, so it worked fine.
"So." She finished, set the folder on the desk between them like she was setting down something that might go off. "I need your signature. On the modification. That's all this is."
That's all this is. He almost laughed, and caught himself, because laughing at that sentence would have been the single worst thing he could do in this room, and he knew it with the same instinct that told him which club business could wait and which couldn't.
He looked at the folder. Didn't reach for it yet.
"Can I ask you something first?"
Her jaw tightened, just slightly, the smallest tell in the world, one he'd catalogued a hundred times over nine years without ever needing to be told what it meant. Here it comes, that jaw said. Whatever he's about to say, here it comes.
"You can ask."
"How's the shop doing? Really doing. Not the — " he gestured at the folder " — not the numbers for the bank. You."
Something crossed her face he couldn't fully name — surprise, maybe, that he'd asked about her instead of the deed, or maybe just surprise that he still knew there was a difference. "It's good," she said, careful. "Better than good. That's kind of the point of the letter."
"I'm glad." And he meant it more than he had words to spend on right now, standing four feet away from her with a signature in his hand that could end this conversation before he was ready for it to end. "I mean that, Em. I'm glad it's good."
"Thank you." Clipped. Guarded. She glanced at the folder again, a clear redirect. "So — the signature."
He picked up the pen. Held it. Didn't sign.
"I want to talk it through properly," he said, and watched her face do something complicated — hope and suspicion arriving at exactly the same time, which he understood, because he wasn't entirely sure himself which one he meant it as.
"Not — not to slow you down. I want to understand the whole plan.
What the second location looks like. Where.
I want — " He stopped himself before he said something true and unguarded, something like I want to know what your life looks like now, and settled instead for something safer that was also, somehow, still true.
"I don't want to just sign a piece of paper about something that matters to you without knowing what it is. "
"It's a signature, Rhys. It doesn't require a business plan presentation."
"Humor me."
He watched her decide whether to fight him on it.
Watched her decide not to, which surprised him — the Emery he'd married would have signed the deal shut with a look and walked out, protecting herself the fastest way available, and this Emery, standing in front of him with eleven months of distance built into her spine, looked at him for a long moment and then, instead, pulled out the chair across from the desk and sat down in it.
"Fine," she said. "Ask your questions."
He asked them. Real ones — square footage, location, whether she'd need to hire again, whether the class she'd apparently been wanting to teach for over a year now (he hadn't known that, and something in him ached quietly at not knowing it, at how much of her life he'd missed the small updates on) was still something she wanted.
She answered every question a little more loosely than the last, some old rhythm between them creaking back into motion despite both of them, and by the time she got to describing the exact spot on Cypress Street she had her eye on, her hands had come up off her lap and started moving the way they used to when she talked about something she loved, shaping the air into a floor plan only she could see.
"There's good light in the afternoons," she said, half to herself, sketching a wall that wasn't there.
"East-facing window in front, so mornings are soft, and then by three it gets warm without being harsh.
I want the sewing stations near the window.
Priya says I'm obsessed with light, and she's not wrong, but you can't teach someone to see a seam clean in bad light. You just can't."
"You always did say that." The words were out before he'd fully weighed them — a memory from some kitchen-table conversation years back, her explaining the same principle about a lamp she wanted for their own kitchen counter, back when kitchen counter had meant something that belonged to both of them.
She stilled. Just slightly, her hands stopping mid-shape in the air, and he watched her decide whether to let the comment pass or push back against the intimacy folded inside it. She let it pass. That, too, he catalogued.
"Anyway," she said, and the floor plan disappeared from the air between them. "That's the shop."
He didn't sign.
Not because he needed more information — he had it now, more than enough, and every answer she'd given him made him want to sign the paper twice as much as he had walking in.
He didn't sign because signing meant the conversation was over, meant she'd fold the paper back into the folder and walk back out to her truck and drive away for however many more months, and some selfish, unworthy part of him — the same part of him he was supposed to be better than by now — wasn't ready to let that happen yet.
"I'll have it signed by Thursday," he said instead.
"There's a — I want to have my attorney's eyes on the language first. Standard thing.
" It wasn't entirely a lie. It also wasn't entirely the truth, and he watched something in her expression shutter closed again, the warmth of the last twenty minutes retreating like a tide going out.
"Right." She stood. Picked the folder back up, held it against her chest instead of in front of it now, a small unconscious shift he catalogued and hated himself a little for noticing. "Okay. Thursday, then."
"Em — "
"I have to get back," she said, and the door was already half open, the bell over it giving its deep, familiar chime, when his phone buzzed hard against his hip — the specific pattern, three short and a pause, that meant club business and meant it now.
He glanced at it on reflex. Salazar collections. Confirmed contact, west lot, 20 min.
His face must have done something, because Emery — already turned to go, one hand on the door — stopped.
"Everything okay?"
"Fine." He put the phone away too fast, and knew even as he did it that fast was its own kind of tell. "Club stuff. Nothing."
She looked at him a beat longer than the answer warranted.
He watched her want to ask again and decide not to — some old habit of hers, the diplomatic retreat, the choice not to push somewhere she wasn't sure she was still allowed to push — and something about watching her make that choice, watching her talk herself back out of a question she clearly still wanted the answer to, sat wrong in his chest in a way he didn't have time to examine.
It was a small thing. It shouldn't have landed the way it did.
But he'd spent nine years learning the difference between Emery-curious and Emery-worried, and what he'd just watched cross her face had been the second one, quickly and deliberately folded away, the same way she used to fold away worry about club business back when she'd still believed it was her place to ask about it.
He hated that she still did that. He hated more that he was the reason she'd learned asking wasn't always safe.
"Thursday," she said again, like an anchor she was throwing down between them.
"Thursday," he agreed.
The bell chimed once more on her way out.
He watched her walk to her truck through the front window, watched her sit in the driver's seat for a second too long before she started the engine, and then he looked down at his phone again, at the message that hadn't gone away just because he wanted it to, and felt eleven months of careful distance start, very quietly, to come apart at the seams.