CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

RILEY

The shop that exists now is not the same shop.

It has the same name — Redline & Redemption, same sign, same font I painted myself the year I opened — and it has the same heart, which is that it was built by hand out of necessity and stubbornness and a genuine love for the specific alchemy of paint and metal and the thing that happens when an object becomes a story someone can ride. But it is not the same shop. It is the shop that shop was always becoming, given time and the right kind of support and about four additional bays.

Mara runs the business side. She has a corner office with a window that looks into the main workshop floor and she sits in it and makes the numbers make sense in the way she makes everything make sense — with precision and good humor and a specific kind of ferocity she reserves for anyone who tries to shortchange us on materials.

I still paint at eleven PM when I have a problem to work out.

Some things don't change.

The twins are nine.

Hunter is so serious about motorcycles that Knox had to institute a formal rule: shop time does not count toward homework. This rule exists because Hunter attempted to argue, at age seven, that troubleshooting an engine was applied physics and should be credited accordingly. He had a presentation. It was impressive. Knox said no anyway, but with the expression he gets when he's impressed and trying not to show it.

Luna runs something. I'm not entirely clear on the mechanics of it but it involves the pack kids, a network of snack-based currency, and at least three ongoing promises that I'm fairly sure constitute small-scale enforceable contracts. She has Knox's eyes and my hair and a negotiating instinct that I suspect she developed on her own without modeling it from either of us, and the other parents find it both charming and slightly alarming, which I think is exactly right.

A human client came in on a Tuesday in September. Nervous — that specific nervousness of someone who knows they're in a wolf-pack-adjacent space and isn't sure of the protocol. He stood in the entrance of the workshop looking at the mix of human and wolf staff with an expression that was trying very hard to be casual.

Luna appeared at his elbow.

She was nine, wearing a shop apron three sizes too large, with paint on her hands and the clipboard she'd been carrying for two years in the way some children carry stuffed animals.

"Hi," she said. "I can show you around. What kind of bike?"

He looked down at her. "A, uh. A 1978 Triumph Bonneville."

Her eyes did the thing. "Original engine?"

"Parts of it."

"Come on." She turned and walked toward bay three, fully confident he would follow. He did. Hunter appeared from under a Ducati chassis and gave the Triumph a professional look and offered a preliminary structural assessment that the client seemed both startled and reassured by.

He left a five-star review online that mentioned, specifically, being given a tour by "two extremely confident nine-year-olds" and called it "the most efficient customer experience I've had in twenty years of custom work."

Knox still comes on Fridays.

Every Friday, closing time, the Harley in the parking lot. I look up from whatever I'm working on and I wipe my hands and I go meet him and we ride home, sometimes with the twins if they're still in the shop, sometimes just the two of us on the two bikes, the black one and the red one, the roads we know well by now.

I was in the bathroom of bay two when I found out.

The test. Positive.

I stood against the wall of the bathroom with the test in my hand and I was smiling so wide it almost hurt, had been smiling for about ten minutes and couldn't stop, just standing there in a shop bathroom with paint on my boots smiling at a piece of plastic like it was the funniest and best joke anyone had ever told.

I went out.

Knox was on the creeper under the custom frame in bay one. Legs sticking out. I tapped his boot once.

He rolled out. Looked up at me.

I held up the test.

He stared at it.

Then he was standing up — fast, too fast, with the exact crack of his head on the underside of the frame that I had been expecting and which I had not warned him about for reasons that I think were slightly mean — and he didn't react to it at all. He was just suddenly upright with both greasy hands on my face.

He looked at me.

I looked at him.

"Hi," I said.

"Hi," he said.

We stood in bay one with the twins somewhere in the building and Mara's voice on a call from the office and the familiar smell of oil and paint and the Harley in the parking lot and the bond warm and present and permanent between us, and that was enough. It was always enough.

It had always been going to be this.