Chapter 10
River
Wednesday morning. The site. Hard hat. Clipboard. The grid reroute on schedule, Phase Two conduit trenching running a day ahead.
"Sinclair, your demo crew needs to clear Section C before we can run the lateral feed."
She doesn't flinch. Not quite. But her shoulders tighten and her chin lifts a fraction and the name lands between us like a door closing.
"Understood. I'll coordinate with Hank."
"Appreciate it."
...discussing conduit placement on a weekday morning in a small town where nothing important has ever happened to either of them.
The crew watches. They're not subtle about it—they've been watching since Monday, when I showed up at the trailer and called her Sinclair for the first time in weeks, and the temperature in the room dropped so fast Hank checked the thermostat.
Lila asked me if everything was okay with a tone that suggested she already knew the answer and was giving me one chance to lie about it.
I lied about it.
"Everything's fine."
"Fine," Lila repeated, in the exact tone Josie uses when she's keeping score. This town shares inflections the way it shares gossip—communally and without consent.
Everything is fine. The job is the job. The grid reroute doesn't care about my personal life, and the twelve thousand volts in the wire don't know that the woman standing twenty feet away with her clipboard and her competent stride is the same woman who was in my bed five days ago, tracing lines across my hand and telling me things she'd never told anyone.
Twelve thousand volts. Clear. Binary. Safe or it kills you.
I appreciate that kind of honesty.
The Triumph comes apart on Wednesday night.
Not because it needs to. The carburetor is rebuilt. The ignition wiring is threaded. The clutch cable is new. The bike was two weeks from running—two weeks from the first test start, the first idle, the first time the engine turned over and I heard my father's project finally come to life.
I take it apart anyway.
Methodical. Systematic. Cylinder head bolts first—each one backed out in sequence, labeled, laid on the workbench in order.
The head comes off, then the valves, then the pistons.
The crankcase opens. The timing chain. The oil pump.
Every piece stripped and cleaned and inspected and set aside with the focused intensity of a man who needs something to dismantle because the thing he actually wants to take apart—the feeling in his chest, the memory of her face in his kitchen, the sound of the word "stay" in her mouth that she didn't say—doesn't have bolts.
Hitch watches from the doorway. He stopped sitting in the yard between the house and the shop two days ago—there's nothing between them to monitor anymore. Now he lies at the shop threshold and tracks me with eyes that have seen this before.
He saw it the first time around. Different shop, different project—a wiring harness my father left half-finished that I tore down and rebuilt four times in the month after she left.
Hitch was a puppy then. He didn't understand.
He understands now. The gray muzzle rests on his paws and the eyes say: You're doing it again.
The thing where you take something apart because you can't take yourself apart.
I've seen this episode. I didn't like it the first time.
The camshaft comes out. Bearing surfaces clean.
No damage. The engine was fine. The engine didn't need a teardown.
The engine was two weeks from running and I'm standing in my shop at midnight holding a perfectly good camshaft and looking at a pile of parts that used to be progress and are now just pieces.
The parallel is so obvious that even the dog can see it.
Eddie shows up Thursday evening. Uninvited, unannounced, carrying a six-pack and an expression that says he's been delegated by a committee of concerned parties to conduct an intervention.
He stands in the shop doorway. Looks at the Triumph—or what used to be the Triumph. The engine is scattered across the workbench in labeled rows. The frame sits on the stand, stripped, skeletal. Chrome tank on the floor.
Eddie sets the six-pack on the bench. Opens two. Hands me one. Sits on the stool.
Five minutes of silence. Ten. Fifteen. Eddie drinking his beer, watching me clean parts that are already clean. The compressor hums. Hitch sighs.
"You're taking that engine apart the way you took your life apart after she left the first time."
I don't stop wiping the camshaft. "The engine needs a full teardown."
"The engine was fine." Eddie's voice is level. No judgment. Just the diagnostic clarity of a mechanic who can read a system failure at twenty paces. "You're not fine. Those are different things."
"Eddie."
"You worked yourself into the ground for two years after she left.
Climbed every pole in the county. Volunteered for every storm call.
Nearly got killed twice—once on County Road 9 in that ice storm, once on the transmission tower outside Ridgeline when you should have been roped and weren't." He pauses.
Takes a drink. "You gonna do that again? "
The cloth stops moving. The camshaft sits in my hand, cool and precise and completely free of emotional complexity.
"She's taking the job in Denver," I say.
"She told you that?"
"She didn't have to. I saw her face when Olson made the offer. I know what that look means. That's the look of someone who just got handed the thing they've been building toward for their entire life."
"And you can't compete with that."
"I'm a lineman in a town of three thousand people.
I climb poles and fix wire and maintain transformers for the county co-op.
I live in the house my father built. I rebuild a motorcycle that's older than most of my friendships.
" I set the camshaft down. "She designs buildings that change skylines. We're not in the same category."
Eddie finishes his beer. Opens another. The silence is the kind that only works with someone who's known you long enough to hear what you're not saying.
"You know what you look like right now?" He nods at the engine parts.
"You look like County Road 9. The ice storm. You were sixty feet up a dead pole in conditions that should’ve shut the crew down, and when I asked what the hell you were doing, you said you were working.
" He takes a drink. "You weren’t working.
You were trying to get hurt somewhere that made sense. "
"Eddie—"
"I've worked beside you for eight years.
I've seen you run hot lines in weather that keeps sane men home.
You're not careful, River—you're reckless in a direction that looks like brave.
And right now you're doing it again. Tearing down a perfectly good engine because the thing that actually needs fixing doesn't have bolts. "
The shop is quiet. The compressor kicks off. Hitch's collar tags clink as he shifts position.
"No," I say. The word tastes like rust.
Eddie stands. Pockets his hands. Looks at the Triumph one more time.
"I've pulled you off two poles you had no business being on.
I'm not pulling you off a third." He taps the workbench.
"Put the bike back together. And then figure out whether you're a man who builds things or a man who tears them down when they get close to finished. "
He leaves. The six-pack stays. I drink two more and don't put anything back together.
Marlene appears Saturday morning. Not at Kincaid's—on my porch.
She's never come to the house before. In twenty years of knowing Marlene Kincaid, the counter at the diner has been the boundary line of our relationship.
The counter is where she dispenses wisdom and cherry pie and observations that cut to the bone.
The porch is different. The porch is personal.
She sits in the second chair. Macy's chair. The chair that still has a ghost of wear from the mornings she sat in it with my flannel and my coffee mug and the smile that made the stars feel redundant.
Marlene doesn't bring food. Doesn't bring coffee. Just herself, in her work apron and her comfortable shoes, wearing an expression that says she's been thinking about what to say for three days and has arrived at the version that will do the most damage.
"Your father loved a woman who chose to stay," she says.
No preamble. No warm-up. Marlene has never believed in warming up—she enters conversations at full voltage, no resistor, no warm-up loop.
"That was his luck, not his virtue. Your mother chose him.
Then she chose Pueblo. He didn't get credit for her first choice, and he didn't deserve blame for her second. "
"Marlene—"
"I'm not done." She smooths her apron. "That girl sat in my booth three nights this week.
Ordered coffee, didn't drink it. Drew floor plans on napkins and then crumpled them up.
Stared at her phone like it owed her something.
" She levels her gaze at me. "That is not a woman who has made up her mind, River.
That is a woman who is terrified she can't have both things she wants, and you—going cold, calling her Sinclair, treating her like a stranger—you're making it easy for her to believe she can't."
The word lands like a slap. Marlene has never called me a coward. Marlene has called me stubborn, thick-headed, overly quiet, emotionally constipated, and "your father's son in every way including the inconvenient ones." But never a coward.
"She left me," I say. Flat. The core of it. The thing I've been building every wall around since she left.