CHAPTER 6
Old Habits
°°°
Emery had the Wrenhouse office to herself on Thursday morning, alone with a stack of paperwork and the hush of a garage bay that hadn't opened for business yet, and she'd been there twenty minutes before she registered the sound of a second engine pulling into the lot.
The building always felt different empty.
She'd noticed that the first time she'd come here alone after the separation, some months back, on an errand that hadn't actually required her presence but that she'd manufactured anyway because she'd wanted, badly and privately, to stand in a space that still remembered them both.
It smelled the same. Motor oil and old coffee and the faint mustiness of a diner kitchen two rooms over that never quite aired out.
She'd sat at this desk that morning and cried for twenty minutes and then fixed her makeup in the visor mirror and driven home and never mentioned it to anyone.
She knew it before she looked up. She'd know that engine in her sleep, in a crowd, underwater — nine years of knowing it had built the recognition into her bones somewhere below conscious thought, and she felt her whole body go tight with something that wasn't quite anger yet but was getting there fast.
Rhys came through the bay door with a coffee in each hand, a thin, transparent pretext already half-formed on his face, and she watched him clock her expression and adjust his approach mid-stride like a man recalculating a landing.
"I was in the area," he said.
"You live twelve minutes from here in the opposite direction."
"I had a supplier call. Figured I'd swing by, see if the copier upstairs needed toner, since — " He stopped himself, visibly hearing how thin it sounded even as he said it, and set one of the coffees down on the desk in front of her instead of finishing the sentence.
Black with a splash. She hadn't had to tell him how she took it in eleven months, and some old, worn-smooth part of her noted that with an ache she didn't have time for right now.
"Rhys."
"I brought coffee. That's not a crime."
"You said you had solo sessions scheduled this week. I said I'd handle it." She kept her voice level, kept her hands flat on the desk instead of doing what they wanted to do, which was ball into fists. "And now here you are. Alone with me. In a building you supposedly had no reason to be at."
"I told you, I had a call — "
"Don't." The word cracked out sharper than she meant it, and she watched him actually flinch this time, no performance in it.
"Don't lie to my face in a room you cleaned for me two weeks ago.
You're not here for toner. You're here because you don't want me sitting in this building by myself, and instead of telling me why, you're standing there holding a coffee like that fixes it. "
Silence. He set the second cup down slowly, like the admission was easier to make with his hands occupied than his mouth.
"Okay," he said. "You're right."
"I know I'm right." Something in her chest had come loose, some dam she'd been holding steady for days finally giving way, and the words came faster now, harder to stop even if she'd wanted to.
"You're doing it again, Rhys. This exact thing.
Deciding what I need protecting from and then protecting me from it without asking, without telling me, without giving me the choice to protect myself.
You did this before. You did this for months before I found out, and I promised myself, when I left, that I would never again be the last person in a room to know what was actually happening in my own life. "
He didn't argue. That, more than anything, was what stopped her — she'd braced for defensiveness, for some version of the old Rhys who explained himself with certainty instead of honesty, and instead he stood there and took it, jaw tight, eyes steady on hers, absorbing every word like he'd earned each one and knew it.
"You're not wrong," he said, when she finally ran out of momentum. "I should have told you I was worried. I should have asked instead of just showing up."
"Worried about what?"
He hesitated. She watched it happen in real time — watched him get right up to the edge of the whole truth and then pull back from it, some old instinct winning out over the new one he was clearly trying, badly, to build.
"There's a security concern. With the club.
It's — connected to some tension we've got with another crew. "
"That's what you said before. That's not an answer, that's the same non-answer with different words." She stood, needing the movement, needing somewhere for the adrenaline in her limbs to go. "Does it involve The Wrenhouse? Is that why you didn't want me here alone?"
Another hesitation, shorter this time. "Yes."
"Does it involve Dally?"
His face did something complicated at that — real fear, unguarded for just a second, there and gone. "I don't know yet. I'm trying to find out."
"You're trying to find out." She heard her own voice climbing and made herself pull it back down, made herself breathe, because yelling at him in an empty garage bay wasn't going to get her the truth any faster than silence would, and she'd learned that particular lesson the hard way too.
"Rhys, I have a sixteen-year-old asking me why the adults in her life don't say things to each other.
I have a business deadline that runs directly through your signature.
And I have you, showing up uninvited with coffee because you're scared of something you won't name.
You don't get to keep doing this. You don't get to protect me by keeping me in the dark and call it love. "
"I'm not — " He stopped. Started again, quieter. "That's not what I'm doing."
"Isn't it?"
The question sat between them, unanswered, the garage bay's fluorescent hum the only sound for a long moment. She watched something shift behind his eyes — not capitulation exactly, but the visible effort of a man forcing himself to stay in a conversation his every instinct was built to escape.
"I don't know how to do this differently," he said finally, and the honesty of it, raw and unpolished, landed harder than any explanation would have.
"I've spent my whole life being the guy who handles things so other people don't have to carry them.
It's not — I'm not doing it because I think you're weak, Em.
I'm doing it because it's the only way I know how to keep the people I love safe, and I don't know how to turn that off just because it cost me the thing I was trying to protect in the first place. "
It was, she recognized distantly, the most honest thing he'd said to her in eleven months. It still wasn't the truth she was actually asking for.
"Then learn," she said. "Because I can't do this again.
I can't spend another year finding out what's actually happening in my life secondhand, or by accident, or because a sixteen-year-old mentions a car in a parking lot and you turn white as a sheet.
If you want anything from me — the signature, the partnership on this deal, anything — it starts with you telling me the truth before I have to drag it out of you one flinch at a time. "
He was quiet for a long moment, and she watched him decide something, watched some internal argument resolve itself behind his face, and for a second she thought — hoped, some traitorous, exhausted part of her actually hoped — that he was about to tell her everything, right here, in a cold garage bay with two cups of cooling coffee between them.
"There's a debt," he said slowly. "Between the club and another crew.
It's old, and it's ugly, and it's gotten worse in the last year for reasons I'm not ready to get into standing in this bay.
" He stopped himself, visibly fighting the pull to keep going, and she watched the door that had almost opened swing halfway shut again.
"I need you to trust me that I'm handling it.
I need a little more time before I lay out the whole thing. "
"That's not trust, Rhys. That's the same wall with a smaller window in it."
"I know how it sounds." He held her gaze, and for once didn't look away, even though she could see what it cost him to hold still under the accusation.
"I'm not doing it to shut you out again.
I'm doing it because some of what I know isn't just mine to tell yet, and I need to be sure before I hand you something that could blow up somebody else's situation along with mine.
Give me until I actually have it straight. Days, not weeks."
It wasn't everything. She could feel the shape of what he wasn't saying the way she could feel the flaw in a seam before she found it — some deeper reason, some specific thread connecting the club's tension to her marriage's collapse that he still hadn't named, and she filed that feeling away without pushing on it yet, because pushing too hard, too fast, felt like it might close the door again before she'd learned to trust it opening at all.
"Days," she said. "Not weeks. I mean that."
"I know you do."
He nodded, slow, and something in his shoulders eased fractionally, like a man who'd been braced for a blow that had landed lighter than expected.
"I won't," he said.
She didn't fully believe him. But for the first time in eleven months, watching him stand there in the gray morning light of a garage bay that still smelled like both their history, she wanted to.
Trust, she was coming to understand, wasn't a switch either.
It didn't flip back on because he'd said three true sentences in a row after a week of careful half-answers.
It accumulated, slow and grudging, the way calluses built on hands that did real work — one small honest thing laid down at a time, and no guarantee any of it would hold under real pressure until the pressure actually came.
She wasn't there yet. She was, maybe, one step closer to being willing to find out.
Her phone buzzed on the desk before either of them could say anything else — a text from Priya, the shop's alarm code acting up again, could she swing by before opening — and the moment broke apart the way moments like that always did, practical life crowding back in before either of them had to decide what came next.
"I have to go," she said, gathering her folder.
"Em." He caught her arm, gently, at the door — not stopping her, just asking her to stop for one more second. "The whole truth. I owe you that. I know I owe you that."
"I know," she said again, and meant it as both an answer and a warning, and walked out into the morning without looking back to see how he took it.