Page 29 of Working For Her Second Chance

"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.