CHAPTER 10
Rules Of Engagement
°°°
Silas had cleared the salvage yard's back office for the conversation, which Wren noticed and didn't comment on — no Dime wandering through for a spare part, no Casey with coffee and easy chatter, just the two of them and a manila folder sitting closed on the desk between them like something that needed permission before it could be opened.
"You don't have to look at all of it today," he said. "Just tell me where you want to start."
"All of it." She sat straighter, the posture she'd learned to use for exactly this kind of conversation, the one that kept her hands from shaking even when the rest of her wanted to. "I've spent eighteen months not knowing things because people decided I couldn't handle them. I can handle them."
He didn't argue, didn't soften it, just opened the folder and turned it to face her.
The parole file was thicker than she'd expected.
Dean's face looked back at her from an intake photo, older than she remembered him, harder around the eyes in a way that made something in her chest clench even now, even with a room and a man and eighteen months of distance between her and whatever that face used to mean to her life.
"Released early," Silas said, tracing a line on the page without touching it, like even the paper deserved some care.
"Good behavior credit. Standard stuff, doesn't mean what it sounds like it means.
Parole conditions include the no-contact order, mandatory check-ins twice a month, and a clause about maintaining distance from your listed address and workplace. "
"He's already violated the workplace distance thing. The parking lot."
"Yeah. Which is why I had Rooster get this formally documented instead of just me telling you what I saw. Anything that goes to a judge later needs a paper trail, not just my word." He flipped to the next page. "There's also this."
This was a summary of Dean's history before the divorce — not the full record, but enough.
Two prior incidents flagged during the original order proceedings, both minor on paper, both patterns Wren recognized in her bones before she'd even finished reading the clinical language describing them.
A pattern of escalation preceding two of his previous violations against other people, in other contexts, going back further than her marriage to him.
"He did this before me," she said quietly. It wasn't really a question.
"Looks that way." Silas's voice had gone careful, the deliberate carefulness of a man delivering something he knew would land hard and had decided not to soften anyway, because softening it would have meant deciding for her again how much truth she could hold.
"Ex before you. Filed something similar, dropped it before it went anywhere. No charges."
Wren sat with that for a long moment, the office quiet except for the distant clang of someone working on an engine somewhere in the yard.
She'd spent eighteen months believing, somewhere under the more rational parts of her brain, that she'd been the exception — that some flaw or failure of judgment unique to her had made her the kind of woman a man like Dean could do that to.
It was easier, in its own bleak way, than the alternative: that he'd have done it to anyone standing where she'd been standing.
"That should make me feel better," she said. "That it wasn't just me. It doesn't, really. But I think it should."
"Give it time." He said it simply, no attempt to rush her toward the feeling she thought she should be having. "Knowing a thing and feeling a thing don't always show up on the same schedule."
She looked at him for a moment — the steady, unhurried way he sat with her in this, no urge visible in him to fix her reaction or manage her toward relief faster than she could actually get there.
"Thank you," she said. "For not telling me it'll be fine."
"Don't know that it'll be fine. Know we're better set up to handle it now than we were a week ago." A faint, wry note entered his voice. "That's the most honest version I've got."
They went through the rest of it together — the check-in schedule, the specific terms of the order, a list of dates and times Rooster had cross-referenced against Dean's known movements over the past month, which was its own quiet, unsettling proof of how carefully someone had been paying attention on her behalf without her ever asking them to.
"I want something in place," Wren said, once they'd gotten through the file. "Not just you telling me things after they happen. Something regular. So I'm not waiting to find out whether today's the day something goes wrong."
"Tell me what that looks like to you."
She hadn't fully worked it out, same as she hadn't fully worked out the terms in the yard two weeks ago, but she built it now, out loud, testing the shape of it as she went.
"Anything you hear — anything, even secondhand, even if it turns out to be nothing — comes to me the same day.
Not filtered through what you think I can handle.
Just the information, and I decide what to do with it. "
"Done." No hesitation in it. "Already told you that. Meant it."
"I know you meant it. I needed to say it again anyway. Out loud. So it's not just a thing you said once during an apology." She held his eyes. "I need to know this is a rule now, not just a good intention from a hard conversation."
"It's a rule." He said it like he was signing something. "You'll hear it, even the ugly parts. Especially those."
Something in her chest loosened at that, not trust exactly — she still wasn't ready to call it that, not fully, not after everything trust had cost her — but something adjacent to it, a load-bearing beam going in before the rest of the structure could be trusted to hold weight.
They sat with the quiet a moment longer than the conversation strictly required, and it was in that gap that Eli's voice carried in from the yard outside — high, delighted, unmistakable — and a moment later the office door banged open and Eli barreled in, breathless, cheeks pink with whatever game had been running outside.
"Silas!" He said it like an announcement, like Silas's presence in the room was the most obviously correct thing that could be happening. "Dime said I can help wash the bike if you say it's okay. Is it okay? Can I?"
It was the first time Wren had heard her son say his name — not "the man" or "the biker guy," the vague categories Eli had been using until now, but Silas, clear and unhesitating and entirely without the careful weighing-out Wren still caught herself doing every time she used it.
She watched something cross Silas's face at the sound of it — brief, involuntary, gone before he could have controlled it even if he'd wanted to — and understood, with a small lurch in her own chest, that she'd just witnessed something land in him that he hadn't expected to feel today.
"That's up to your mom," he said, voice steady despite whatever had just moved through him. "She's the boss of that."
Eli turned his full, hopeful attention on her, and Wren found herself nodding before she'd finished thinking it through, because refusing felt, suddenly, like refusing something larger than a bucket of soapy water and a motorcycle.
"Ask first if the water's warm enough," she said. "And don't get in Dime's way."
Eli was gone again in a blur of pink cheeks and enthusiasm, and the office went quiet in his wake, the settled quiet of two adults who'd just watched something small and significant happen and weren't sure yet how to talk about it.
"He's a good kid," Silas said again, the same three words from two weeks ago, except this time something underneath them sat heavier, like the sentence had grown a second meaning since the last time he'd said it.
"Yeah," Wren said. "He is."
Neither of them moved to close the folder for a moment longer than necessary.