49. Lance
Lance
The interior smells like leather and something faintly mechanical. The seat is wide and low. The dash is original, with gauges lit soft amber.
George slides into the driver’s seat beside me and turns the ignition.
The engine kicks hard before settling into a rumble that vibrates through the entire frame of the car, deep enough that I can feel it through the seat.
It feels nothing like modern cars. It feels alive.
George pulls out onto the road. I watch the city pass through the window and don’t say anything, and neither does he.
Five months since I left San Diego, surviving him in pieces instead of all at once, sitting here beside him feels dangerously close to slipping backward in time.
I feel something close to a heartbeat coming back into my chest.
Knowing he’d been sick for over a week made me feel things I had no business feeling.
The mental image of him alone in his place, powering through it with no one checking on him, cuts sharper than it should have.
I had to dig deep for the scraps of dignity I have left, that means no jumping on the man the second I see him from that fucking stage tonight.
He drives west, and I don’t ask where. The road climbs and then opens up, and suddenly there’s water on our left, a stretch of coastal road with nothing but sky above it, and the sound of the engine, the heater running low.
“If you’re here,” I ask after a while, keeping my tone even, “who’s looking after the shop?”
George glances at me, then exhales through his nose. “How do you know there’s still a shop? ProMotive had been breathing down my neck even before you left.”
I try to keep a straight face.
“Thank you,” he says quietly.
I let out a short sound. “What for?”
“Lance.”
“Eh. May have made some calls.”
He gives me that look the one he uses when he knows I’m full of shit.
“Carter saw you that Sunday morning. Said you were across the street, just standing there on the pavement like you were waiting for a bus, hands in your pockets, watching the lot. Trying to look like anybody else walking past.” He pauses.
“Trevor told me you spent the whole weekend at his place, that you’d been working on the fundraising remotely from Seattle for weeks before that. ”
I keep my eyes on the road.
“Also had a long conversation with Adrian too,” he continues. “And Vince.”
Wonderful. My friends—paragons of loyalty, every single one of them. I don’t say anything to that, so he fills in the rest himself.
“Dolores told me the coalition application came in already written. Polished. Whoever put it together knew exactly what language they respond to and what they throw out.” He pauses. “That was you.”
I don’t confirm it. Don’t deny it either.
“You called Oscar before you even landed back in Seattle. Already had the foundation contact identified, the veteran coalition shortlisted, the timeline mapped against the buyout deadline. He said all he had to do was make the introductions because you’d already figured out who to call and in what order. ”
“Oscar knows people—”
“You told him who to call, Lance. You'd already worked the whole damn thing out. Everyone else just had to pick it up and run with it.”
I look at the road.
“The private foundation summary—the one-page thing that got them to move in under thirty days—Oscar said you drafted the first version. That you knew the framing that would work because you’d looked up their previous grants and reverse-engineered what they fund.
He was mostly just reading back what you’d already written. ”
“I had time,” I say. “I was in Seattle, I wasn’t doing anything—”
“You were looking after your mother,” George says. “Running Hearthside’s backlog. Picking up shifts at the urgent care.” He stops. Breathes out. “You had no time. You made time.”
I swallow hard.
“Dolores also said you called her the week before the car show. Made sure the coalition’s co-sponsorship would be publicly acknowledged at the event, and that it would put them in front of exactly the businesses they’re trying to reach.”
He glances at me. “She called it a very well-reasoned call. You sold her on it.”
“I made a point.”
“Lance.” He says my name like a full stop.
“The boys helped. Adrian ran the event. Vince brought the crowd. Trevor held it together on the ground. I know that. But every single piece of it started with something you’d already figured out before any of them knew what they were doing.
” He exhales. “Without the framework you laid, none of it had anywhere to go.”
“Couldn’t have done it without them,” I say finally. “I mean that.”
He’s quiet for a moment. When he speaks again his voice has dropped. “I never expected any of it to work out the way it did.” His thumb drums once against the wheel. “I keep thinking about that weekend. How many people showed up. Even after we—” He stops.
The car feels too small suddenly.
“Terrence manages the shop now. Grew up six blocks from the building. He used to hang around the shop as a kid watching the mechanics work.”
George’s mouth shifts slightly, not quite a smile.
“Started bringing his son around too. Been running his own setup out of a rented bay for years, so I know I can trust him. The programs, the staff—it’s all still there.
” There’s a bit of energy in his voice now.
“Terrence has VA contacts. He plans to expand the apprenticeship side.”
He drums his thumb once against the stick.
“I think that’s the part that matters. My dad built something that keeps going even if I’m not the one running it.”
“Doesn’t really tell me why you have to leave the shop for someone to look after,” I say eventually, aiming for light and sounding somewhere near casual.
“Trevor also got me into engineering school here.”
I blink at him, not quite processing it. “He did what?”
“I applied to Cascadia Tech in November,” he says, steady like this is a completely normal sentence to drop into my evening. “Got into the January intake for the experienced practitioner pathway. Mechanical engineering.”
I fucking knew he still had it in him.
He keeps driving, one hand loose on the wheel. “Trevor handled most of the enrollment while I was dealing with the shop. But it’s been actively in my head ever since…” He glances at me briefly. “That conversation we had.”
That was in his garage, with me running my mouth and accidentally changing the trajectory of someone’s entire life, apparently.
George’s mouth quirks briefly, then fades. “When you left, I finally had time to think. I was lucky there were slots available for the intake. Had to write an essay and all that shit.”
I lean back against the seat, still trying to process the fact George apparently has homework now.
“You wrote an application essay,” I repeat slowly, “Like an actual student.”
His jaw tightens a little. “Don’t start.”
“Oh, I absolutely will. Did Trevor help you format your citations? You got a little backpack hidden somewhere?”
A rough sound leaves him, almost a laugh. “Fuck off.”
I grin before I can stop myself, and it hurts a little how natural it feels.
“What’d you write about?”
He nods once toward the dash. “The Torino.”
I lean back against the seat. “Okay, now I need to hear how you voluntarily wrote multiple pages about your feelings through automotive metaphors.”
A breath of laughter leaves him
“It started about the rebuild,” he says after a second. “Then it kinda stopped being just about the car.”
The city lights move across his face while he drives, pieces of color sliding over his jaw and disappearing again.
“Anybody can strip an engine down and replace parts,” he says. “The hard part’s figuring out what still matters enough to keep, and what you’re only keeping because it’s familiar.”
I stay silent.
“The Torino needed a full rebuild from the start. I knew that. But I still tried to save parts I should’ve let go of earlier, not because they were useful, but only because they’d always been there.”
He clears his throat once, and I can feel it—he’s trying so hard to put himself out there, something he normally wouldn’t let anyone see.
“And after a while, you realize hanging onto something out of habit can start costing you the thing itself. You can’t rebuild anything properly if you keep trying to force it back into what it used to be.”
The road hums softly under the tires.
“And sometimes the foundation’s solid enough that changing it doesn’t ruin what it was. It just lets it become something better than it was before. Same car, but now built to run better.”
Some beat stretches between us.
“Guess the whole point of the damn essay was…” He lets out a small breath. “If something’s mattered to you for a long time, you just stop being afraid of what it could become. You let it grow into something you can’t afford to lose…and can’t help but love. With all of you.”
I drop my gaze to the dashboard before he can see what that does to me. My vision blurs. I blink hard, grateful it’s dark so he can’t see me sitting here like I’ve just been emotionally rear-ended while he’s driving his dad’s dream car down a dark coastal road.
This is the calmest I’ve felt in months. The engine rumble, the low heat coming through the vents—it’s all working together to lower my defenses whether I like it or not.
Then, like he can’t hold it in anymore, he says it into the dark.
“I fucking miss you.”
My throat tightens so fast it’s almost violent. I keep my eyes locked on the water outside, pretending the sudden sting in them is from anything else anything except the way his words just went straight through me and left nothing untouched behind.
He keeps going, voice cracking but clear.
“The day you left San Diego, this heavy fucking ache started in my chest. I could barely breathe. Could barely eat. I still dragged my ass out of bed every day, opened the shop, fixed cars, worked on the buyout. Kept building whatever future I was trying to scrape together, but none of it felt right. Nothing’s felt right since you left. ”