CHAPTER EIGHT

KNOX

I'd had the helmets made three days in advance.

Getting the lettering right was the hard part. Riley's style is specific — she learned calligraphy somewhere along the line, uses it for the custom job plaques in the shop, has a way of writing people's names like each letter belongs to them specifically. I had Grayson photograph six examples off the plaques and sent them to the guy in Portland who does custom paintwork for the pack's bikes. He sent me back three samples before I approved one. Worth it.

Hunter stared at his helmet for exactly ten seconds when I handed it to him. Just stood there in the parking lot holding it with both hands, looking at his name on the side in that dark silver lettering, and then made a sound that I can only describe as the thing that happens to your ribcage when something hits it from the inside.

I told Grayson about it later. He said, "That's the sound, man. That's the whole thing." He wasn't wrong.

Luna put hers on immediately, backwards, then corrected it without comment and looked up at me with those green-gold eyes waiting to see what came next. She'd painted wolf prints on it overnight with shop paint — small, neat, perfectly spaced — without being asked or told or even hinted at. She just saw what it needed and did it. She was so much like her mother it was almost hard to look at.

"Okay," I said. "Who's first?"

Hunter's hand shot up.

Riley watched from the shop doorway with her arms crossed and an expression I was getting to know — the one where she was holding herself very carefully back from a feeling she hadn't decided what to do with yet. I didn't look at her directly. Looking at her directly when she had that expression tended to make me say things I wasn't ready to say, or ask things she wasn't ready to answer, and we had exactly fifty-two days left and I wasn't wasting any of them on a conversation that came too early.

Mara was beside her. Mara was taking photos on her phone with absolutely zero subtlety and appeared to be experiencing a private joy so intense it required documentation.

I took Hunter first. Slow circuits around the parking lot — maybe fifteen miles an hour, nothing, barely moving — but he leaned forward on the tank with his little hands on the chrome and went totally silent in the way kids go silent when something is so good it temporarily knocks all the noise out of them. When we rolled to a stop he said, "Again," so I went again, and then again, and then he looked up at me when we finally stopped for real and said, "It's like flying on a really big dog."

I sat with that for a second.

"Yeah," I said. "That's exactly what it is."

Luna was different. Luna leaned back. She spread her arms out to the sides when we picked up even that gentle speed, face turned up into the breeze, and just — screamed. Pure joy, nothing complicated in it, just a four-year-old discovering that wind could be a feeling and deciding she approved completely. My vision blurred twice. I had to slow down once just to pull myself together.

Riley was still in the doorway when I brought Luna back. She had her arms crossed tighter than before and she was looking somewhere to the left of us, jaw slightly set, and I knew that expression too. That was the one where she was feeling something large and had decided the safest place to put it was sideways.

I didn't say anything about it.

The twins napped in the office around one, curled together on the little couch under Riley's leather jacket, and I walked through the shop properly for the first time.

I'd been in it before — we'd cooked in her kitchen, ridden in the parking lot, passed through the front — but I hadn't really looked. I looked now.

Every bike she'd worked on had a small plaque: the client's name, the date, two or three lines about what the commission meant to them and what she'd done with it. A guy named Marcus who'd survived cancer and wanted his bike repainted the color of his wife's eyes. A woman named DeShonda who'd inherited her father's Harley and asked Riley to restore it exactly as he'd left it. A teenage kid saving up to buy his first bike who'd commissioned a design for the tank before he could even afford the bike itself, just to have something to work toward.

She'd written the plaques herself. The same lettering as the helmets.

I stood in front of each one. I read every word.

I thought about her building this. Building it out of nothing, in a city she moved to alone, pregnant, with whatever she had in her pockets and whatever she refused to stop being despite everything I'd done. I thought about the five years I spent drowning in whiskey and regret and the specific cruelty of my own choices, and I thought about what those same five years had built here, in this shop, with those plaques and that lettering.

I paid off the business loan at three-thirty in the afternoon through a holding company Grayson set up in twenty minutes. Untraceable back to me. Clean transfer, full amount, marked paid in full.

I told myself she'd never know.

Her accountant called her at six-fifteen.

She called me at six-eighteen.

I let it ring.

I called her back an hour later when I calculated she'd had enough time to finish being furious and start being the other thing.

"You want to ask me something," I said when she picked up.

"I want to tell you to reverse it."

"Can't. Already processed."

"Knox—"

"Ask me why."

A pause. "Why."

"Because it was never yours to carry alone." I was quiet for a second. "The shop is yours. It was always going to be yours, whatever happened with us. I'm just — I owed you. I owe you a lot more than that, actually. Consider it an installment."

The silence lasted long enough that I thought she might've hung up.

Then: "Don't do that again without telling me first."

"Okay."

"I mean it."

"I know you do."

Another pause. "The twins want to know if you're doing the Saturday ride."

I almost smiled. "Ask them to ask their mother if I can."

She hung up. Twenty minutes later I got a text from Hunter's tablet — they'd had it supervised for six months for exactly this kind of maneuver — that said: *mommy says yes but she wants you to ask her yourself*

I waited until the next morning. Went downstairs, knocked on the door, and asked her directly. She looked at me for a long moment with both twins hanging off her arms asking if today was Saturday, was today Saturday, was it Saturday yet.

"I'll let you know tomorrow," she said.

She texted me at six the next morning.

*Fine. 9am. Don't be late.*

I was there at eight-forty-five.