CHAPTER 3
Selene
I don't sleep well the night after the garage.
I lie awake replaying it — the sound of my name in Damon's mouth, the particular gentleness in his big scarred hands as he clicked Mia's new buckle into place, the way he'd sat in his truck at the end of my driveway for what felt like far too long before his headlights finally swung away into the dark.
By morning I've decided it doesn't matter.
Whatever this is — old ghost, old wound, a man who happened to be standing in the one garage in town with an open bay — it's a closed loop.
My car runs. Mia's safe in her new seat.
I don't have to see Damon Sterling again unless I choose to, and I am choosing not to, because I built this careful, contained life out of exactly this kind of restraint, and I'm not about to unravel two years of hard work over a pair of dark eyes and a low, gravelly voice that still knows exactly how to say my name.
I tell myself all of that while I'm making Mia's lunch for daycare, and I mostly believe it until I get home from my shift that evening and find the kitchen sink actively flooding my floor.
"No," I say to the empty kitchen, to the growing lake spreading across the linoleum, to the universe in general. "No, no, no."
It's not a small leak. The pipe under the sink has split somewhere along a seam, and water's pooling out fast enough that by the time I've grabbed every towel in the house and thrown them down like sandbags, my socks are soaked through and my landlord — a man who answers his phone maybe one call in five and has never once returned a maintenance request inside of a week — isn't picking up.
Mia's parked in front of a cartoon on the ancient TV in the living room, blissfully unaware her mother is on her hands and knees in six inches of water trying to remember which of the two shutoff valves under the sink actually does anything, when a heavy knock lands on the front door.
I freeze. Every instinct I've spent two years honing goes taut at once — nobody knocks on this door. Nobody knows this address except the daycare, my landlord, and Clara from the diner, and none of them have any reason to be standing on my porch at seven in the evening.
I cross to the window instead of the door, peer through the gap in the curtain, and every alarm in my chest goes off for an entirely different reason.
Damon Sterling is standing on my porch in the rain, a heavy metal toolbox in one hand and a grocery bag hooked over the other wrist, wearing the same unhurried, absolutely certain expression he wore in the garage two nights ago.
I open the door before I've fully decided to.
"How do you know where I live?"
Not hello. Not thank you again for the car seat. Just the question that's been sitting in my chest since I saw his headlights following me home two nights ago, because a man doesn't just happen to end up at your door with a toolbox.
"Small town." He says it easy, unbothered, like it explains everything, and maybe in Oakhaven it does — but I catch something flicker behind his eyes that tells me there's more to it than that, something he's not saying, and filing that away for later feels like the smart move.
"That's not really an answer."
"It's the only one you're getting tonight.
" His gaze drops past me, into the house, and whatever he sees there — the towels stacked in the doorway to the kitchen, the faint sound of water still running somewhere behind me — has him moving before I can stop him, stepping past me into the hall like he's been invited, toolbox already swinging down off his shoulder. "You've got a leak."
"I've got a lot of a leak, and I don't remember asking you to fix it."
"You didn't." He's already crouched by the kitchen doorway, surveying the damage with the same economical focus he brought to my dead battery — assessing, cataloging, already three steps ahead of me in solving a problem I haven't finished being angry about yet.
"I brought dinner too. Figured you hadn't eaten. "
"Damon."
"Selene." He looks up at that, and there's something steady in his face that stops the rest of my protest cold — not smug, not pushy in the way I braced for, just calm, like he already knew I'd fight him on this and has decided to let the fight happen without letting it change his plans.
"You've got a flooded kitchen, a kid in the next room, and I'm already here with a toolbox.
Let me fix your sink. Then I'll leave, if that's what you want. "
I open my mouth to argue — because arguing is what I do, arguing is the wall I've built brick by brick over two years of learning that letting a man walk in and handle things is exactly how you end up small enough to fit inside somebody else's control — and then a small, sticky hand tugs at the hem of my shirt.
"Uncle D!" Mia's abandoned her cartoon entirely, delighted, utterly unbothered by the six inches of water soaking through her socks as she crosses the kitchen floor to plant herself directly in front of Damon. "Are you fixing our sink? Mama said a bad word about it."
Heat floods my face. "I did not say a bad word."
"You said the s-word." Mia holds up one hand, fingers splayed, deeply serious. " Stupid pipe."
Damon's mouth does something at the corner — not quite a smile, but close, a crack of warmth breaking through the granite of his expression as he looks down at my daughter standing ankle-deep in dish water with absolute, unshakeable confidence in her own authority.
"Stupid pipe," he agrees gravely. "You want to help me fix it? "
"Yes." No hesitation, same as the car seat.
She drops to her knees beside him in the puddle without a second thought, peering under the sink like she's been doing plumbing repairs her whole life, and something about the sight of it — my careful, guarded daughter kneeling in floodwater next to a man in a leather cut, completely unafraid, chattering at him about the drawing she made at daycare — undoes something in my chest I don't have a name for.
I stand in the doorway another second, watching them, and I let the fight go. Not because he's won it. Because there's a flooded kitchen and a four-year-old already elbow-deep in the problem, and pride has never once mopped a floor.
"Fine," I say. "But I'm helping too. It's my house."
"Wouldn't dream of stopping you."
It takes him forty minutes to fix what would have taken me the better part of a week and cost more than I have — a split coupling under the sink, apparently, something he explains to Mia in patient, simple terms while she hands him tools from his box with the gravity of a surgical nurse, passing him a wrench when he asks for it and, once, memorably, a roll of electrical tape when he asks for a pipe fitting, which he accepts without comment and sets quietly aside.
I mop while they work, wringing towel after sodden towel into a bucket, and somewhere in the rhythm of it — water, wring, water, wring — I let myself actually look at him.
Not the ghost of who he was at eighteen, not the ache of twelve years of silence, but the man actually in my kitchen tonight: patient with my daughter in a way I didn't expect from someone who runs a motorcycle club, careful with his big hands around small plumbing fittings, quick with a low, dry joke that makes Mia dissolve into giggles every few minutes.
"There." He tightens the last fitting, runs the water to test it, watches the pipe hold steady with visible satisfaction. "That'll hold. Whoever did the original install used the wrong coupling — cheap fix, guaranteed to fail eventually. I'll bring the right part by tomorrow, do it properly."
"You don't have to keep coming back."
"I know." He says it simply, like the knowing doesn't change anything, and starts packing his tools away with the same unhurried economy he does everything with. "Doesn't mean I won't."
I don't have a response to that. I busy myself instead with the grocery bag he brought, unpacking it onto the counter — a rotisserie chicken still warm from the diner, a container of mashed potatoes I recognize as Clara's from the smell alone, a small bag of animal crackers that I'd bet money he picked specifically for Mia.
It's an unfairly thoughtful list of groceries for a man who claims small-town gossip taught him my address.
"Clara give you my order?" I ask, only half joking.
"Clara gave me an earful about minding my business.
" He says it dry, almost amused, folding his tall frame down onto one of my mismatched kitchen chairs like it's the most natural thing in the world, like he hasn't spent twelve years as a stranger to this house.
"Told her I was bringing you dinner. She said, and I quote, 'about damn time,' and packed the bag herself. "
Something warm and unwelcome unfurls in my chest at that — the idea of gruff, sharp-tongued Clara, who's fed me more free pie than she'll ever admit to and asked exactly zero invasive questions in two years of employing me, quietly approving of Damon Sterling showing up at my door.
Clara doesn't approve of much. Clara's opinion means something.
I don't examine why that matters to me right now.
I set the table instead, or what passes for setting the table in my house — three mismatched plates, a roll of paper towels standing in for napkins — and we eat at my small kitchen table with rain drumming steady on the roof and Mia narrating an elaborate story about her day at daycare that involves, at various points, a dinosaur, a stolen crayon, and a teacher named Miss Pam who is, apparently, "kind of mean but also has good snacks. "