CHAPTER NINE

RILEY

I was in the middle of laying down a base coat when Knox walked in.

Not unusual — he'd been showing up at the shop most mornings, had started making himself useful in ways that made it hard to stay angry because you couldn't actually argue with someone who knew the difference between a torque wrench and a breaker bar and didn't need to be told twice. I'd stopped pretending to be annoyed about it around day three. I was still annoyed, I just stopped performing it.

But this morning was different because this morning I had something to say.

"You paid off my loan," I said without turning around.

"Yes." He was already in his work shirt, sleeves rolled up, picking up a rag off the bench like he planned to be there all day.

"Forty-six thousand dollars."

"Forty-seven-two. Interest."

I put down the brush. I turned around.

"I didn't ask you to do that."

"No."

"I was handling it."

"I know you were." He leaned against the workbench and looked at me and didn't do any of the things I'd expected — didn't get defensive, didn't explain himself, didn't apologize in the way that's really just repackaged self-defense. He just stood there with his arms folded and let me have it, which was somehow more infuriating than anything else he could've done.

"You don't just get to walk into my life and start — buying things. Paying things. Like that fixes—"

"I know it doesn't fix anything."

"Then why—"

"Because I could." He said it quietly. "And because you were carrying something you shouldn't have had to carry. And because I owe you." He paused. "I know it doesn't even scratch the surface of what I owe you. I know that. But I'm not gonna pretend I can sit upstairs with more money than I'll ever need and watch you manage a business loan that exists because you built an entire life alone when you shouldn't have been alone. I can't do that, Riley."

The shop was quiet.

Paint fumes and morning light and the distant sound of the twins in my office where they'd been watching a movie.

I was gearing up for the next thing when he said, very quietly: "You kept my letters. Five years. Every single one."

Everything in me stopped.

"I—" I started.

"Fourteen letters. Same shoebox. On top in the kitchen when I found it." He looked at me. "You kept them."

"That's not—" I turned back to the bike. Picked up the brush. "That doesn't mean anything. I just forgot they were there."

"Okay."

"I've moved three times. I had a lot of boxes. Things end up in places."

"Sure."

"Knox—"

"I didn't say anything." His voice was completely neutral. It was the neutrality that got me. The complete, unaccusing, patient neutrality of a man who knew what he knew and was willing to let me have whatever story I needed.

I wanted to throw the brush at him.

I didn't.

I heard movement from across the shop — Mara, who had appeared sometime in the last five minutes with snacks and both twins in tow, and was now walking very purposefully toward the office door with a twin under each arm and a bag of pretzels and an expression that said she had assessed the situation and removed herself and the children from it with the efficiency of someone who'd been doing exactly this for years. Because she had.

The shop door to the office clicked shut.

Knox picked up a wrench. Then put it down. Then picked it up again.

"Sit down," I said.

He sat on the stool at the workbench.

"Tell me about your father," I said. "What actually happened. Not the version I made up in my head for five years. The real one."

He was quiet for a moment.

Then he told me.

He told it straight, without editorializing, without trying to make himself sympathetic. His father, two days before the wedding. The threat — not vague, not implied, specific and documented and delivered in the way only someone who held the power to execute it could deliver something. Every human in the town where my mother lived. My family. My mother. The people at my school who'd been kind to me. His father had named them. One by one.

He told me about standing at the altar knowing it before I arrived. About the mic. About the way the words came out and the part of him that died somewhere in the middle of them. About leaving. About the next six months. About his father's hunting accident, which was not an accident, and which he said plainly and without emotion, and which I had suspected for five years but never said out loud.

I sat on the bench across from him and I listened.

I didn't interrupt. I didn't offer him anything. I let him have the whole shape of it.

When he finished the shop was quiet again.

"I believed him," Knox said. "My father. I believed he would do it. I still think he would've." He looked at his hands. "I'm not asking you to decide whether that was the right call. I don't know if it was. What I know is that I chose wrong and you paid for it, and there isn't a version of the math where that adds up to anything other than what it was."

I didn't forgive him.

I want to be clear about that. I didn't feel the gates opening, didn't feel some cinematic shift of light and warmth that meant the score was settled. Five years of carrying that rejection like a bruise that never fully healed doesn't dissolve in one conversation in a paint shop at nine in the morning.

But I could see it now. The whole picture instead of just my angle of it. Two nineteen-year-olds and a monster between them and choices nobody should have to make at that age.

It didn't make it okay. But it made it real in a different way than it had been.

"Get out of my shop," I said. Not unkindly. Just — I needed him to go.

He got up. Picked up his jacket off the back of the stool. Walked to the door and stopped with his hand on the frame.

He didn't say anything. He just left.

I waited until I heard his bike start and pull out before I went to the office, sent the twins to the bathroom to wash their pretzel hands, and closed Mara inside with me.

"He told you," she said. Not a question.

"Yeah."

She put her hand on my arm and didn't say anything else, which was why she was my best friend and had been for four years and would be for the rest of my life.

That evening I opened the shoebox.

I counted them.

Fourteen letters. The last one dated three weeks before the wedding. The first one, at the bottom of the stack, written when he was sixteen in handwriting that was all angles and effort, starting with the words: *I'm not good at this but I'm gonna try.*

All fourteen. Every single one.

I put the lid back on and didn't examine what that meant.

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