chapter 7

I woke up on my third full day at Cliff's End with grease still under my fingernails from the day before, and for the first time in weeks, I didn't immediately wish I were somewhere else.

That was either progress or a sign I had finally lost the plot completely. I wasn't sure which.

The cabin smelled like cedar and the faint ghost of whoever had lived here last old coffee, wood polish, something vaguely mechanical. I'd started leaving the window cracked at night, not because it was warm enough for it, but because the sounds of the garage had become a kind of white noise I needed. The low murmur of engines idling. Wrenches against metal. Occasionally Rafe's voice drifting over with a laugh that sounded like a man who had made peace with something.

I dressed quickly and made my way across the gravel path.

The garage was already in full swing by the time I arrived, even though it wasn't yet eight. Rafe was beneath a truck, visible only by his boots. Mouse sat cross-legged on a tool chest with a circuit board and a soldering iron, not looking up at anyone or anything. Ghost was at the far end of the bay doing something to a stripped-down engine with the focused intensity of a man performing surgery.

No one said anything to me when I walked in.

I didn't need them to.

I found a carburetor on the secondary workbench an older model, caked in buildup, clearly pulled off a bike that had been sitting too long. Nobody had touched it. I pulled up a stool, grabbed a flat-head screwdriver and a can of carb cleaner, and started working.

There is something meditative about taking an engine apart. My father taught me this. He used to say that machines don't lie not like people do. You could trust a machine to tell you exactly where it hurt, as long as you knew how to listen. A rough idle means one thing. A lean stumble at higher RPMs means another. You had to learn the language, and once you did, everything else became a little more legible.

I had spent five years in an industry built on perception, on managing how things looked rather than how they actually worked. Event management polishing surfaces, crafting narratives, making sure the right people were photographed in the right light. I was good at it. I was very good at it. And somewhere in all that polish, I had stopped trusting anything real.

The carburetor was real.

I removed the float bowl, cleaned the passages, checked the jets. The buildup was significant but not catastrophic. Nothing a good soak and a steady hand couldn't fix. I worked slowly, methodically, the way my father had shown me. Not because I had nowhere to be, but because the work deserved it.

At some point, I became aware that Jax was watching me.

Not in an intrusive way. More the way you notice a shift in a room's atmosphere a slight change in pressure, a shadow that wasn't there before. I didn't look up. I kept working. The carburetor needle slid free and I set it on a clean rag, aligning the pieces in order so I could reassemble without second-guessing myself.

A few minutes later, I heard him move to the adjacent bench and start working on something of his own. The regular rhythm of it methodical, unhurried told me he wasn't rushing to get away from me. He was just working. We were just two people in the same space.

It was the most comfortable I had felt in weeks.

By mid-morning, I had the carburetor reassembled, cleaned, and ready. I set it on the workbench and looked around for whoever the bike belonged to, to let them know it was done.

Rafe slid out from under the truck and looked at the carburetor. Then at me. Then back at the carburetor.

"You strip that yourself?" he asked.

"It needed it."

"Nobody asked you to."

I shrugged. "Nobody asked me not to."

He grinned wide and warm and completely unguarded. "I like her," he said to no one in particular.

Mouse didn't look up but raised a hand in some kind of non-committal acknowledgment.

I caught the very edge of Jax's jaw from the corner of my eye. He was looking at the carburetor with an expression I couldn't fully read. Not approval exactly. But not indifference either.

He didn't double-check my work.

I noticed.

* * *

That evening, after the others had drifted home or into the back rooms, I sat alone in the cabin with my laptop open and the flash drive in my hand.

I had been putting this off. Not because I didn't know what was on it I did but because looking at it meant admitting the full shape of what Darren had done. Not just the humiliation of the wedding. Not just the grief of losing my father in the weeks that followed. But the calculated, deliberate way he had built a trap and used my name and my business as the walls.

I plugged the drive in.

The folder labeled 'Reception Seating' opened without ceremony. The same fraudulent invoices I had seen before. The same phantom vendors, the same wire transfer records with my company's letterhead at the top and Darren's political machinery running beneath it like a buried current.

I opened a new folder. Named it: Evidence.

Then I started moving files.

Every invoice. Every transfer record. Every signed document with my name on it that I had never seen, never approved, never known existed. I moved them all, organizing them by date, by vendor, by dollar amount. I created a separate sub-folder for the subcontractors that didn't exist I had cross-referenced two of them against public business databases and found nothing. No filings. No addresses. Just names and bank account numbers.

I worked for two hours without stopping.

By the time I closed the laptop, the Evidence folder held forty-seven documents.

I sat in the quiet of the cabin and thought about the version of myself who had stood at that altar not yet two weeks ago, certain that the worst thing in the world was being publicly abandoned. I hadn't known yet about the money. About the fraud. About how neatly Darren had arranged things so that if anyone came looking, my name was the one at the bottom of every document.

Systematic. Intentional. Cowardly.

I pressed my hands flat on the table and took a long, slow breath.

First, I would survive.

Then, I would fight.

Those were Marge's words. They felt like mine now.