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Home / Romance / Love On Two Wheels / Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

All Chapters of Love On Two Wheels : Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

80 Chapters

41

They came on a Sunday.I saw the car from the garage window first — the same silver rental, or one so similar that it registered in my body before my eyes confirmed it. Then a second car behind it. A different model, dark blue, older. Not a rental. I knew that before I could have explained how.Claudine got out of the first car.Jane got out of the second.My mother looked exactly as I had imagined she would — smaller than memory, the way parents tend to be when you encounter them outside the context in which they exist in your head. Her hair was shorter. She was wearing a coat that was slightly too formal for a Sunday morning drive to a coastal garage, which told me she had thought about what to wear and had landed on the wrong thing, which was very Jane.She saw me across the lot and her face did something complicated — relief and guilt and the specific expression of a person who wants forgiveness and is frightened it will cost more than they have available.Claudine was already cro

42

The private investigator delivered the papers in person.He was not dramatic about it. He arrived on a Wednesday morning in a grey sedan, dressed in a way that communicated professional errand rather than confrontation — jacket, no tie, the shoes of someone who walked a lot and had stopped caring what that did to the leather. He parked cleanly at the edge of the lot, walked to the garage door, and asked for Jasper Wolfe with the flat directness of someone who had done this many times and had no personal investment in the recipient's response.Jax appeared in the doorway.I was at my bench. I watched from peripheral vision while appearing to attend to the carburetor I was cleaning.The PI handed over a document envelope — thick, the kind that takes weeks to compile. He said something that I couldn't fully hear but which had the syntax of a formal statement being delivered rather than a conversation. Jax took the envelope. Said nothing. The PI nodded once and walked back to the grey sed

43

I found the papers on a Thursday morning.I had come into the garage early — earlier than usual, before Jax, before anyone — to get a start on a job that was giving me difficulty and that I had been thinking about in the grey pre-dawn hour when sleep gives up and leaves you with problems instead. The main bay was empty. The light was that particular early quality — the fluorescents not yet on, just the natural light through the high windows, flat and directionless.The envelope was open on Jax's bench.Not deliberately left for me. Just open, pages spread, the way documents look when someone has been reading them and has been interrupted or has walked away to think and will return.I saw enough in passing to understand the general shape: formal legal language, estate terminology, the Wolfe family crest on the letterhead. A deadline date, underlined in the margin in Jax's handwriting — the only mark he had made on the documents.I read enough to understand. Then I looked away.I had no

44

She arrived on a Tuesday while Jax was away.I know the timing was not coincidental. I know that now. At the time, I filed it as possibly coincidental and continued watching.She came on a bike — a good one, well-maintained, the kind of machine that gets that way through regular care rather than occasional attention. She was striking in the way that people who have learned to use their appearance as currency become striking: deliberate, composed, fully aware of the effect. Late twenties, maybe thirty. Dark hair, dark coat. She pulled into the lot and dismounted with the ease of someone who had ridden a long way and was not, despite that, anything other than exactly as she intended to appear.She asked for Jax by name.Rafe went still in the specific way he went still when something unexpected landed — not visible alarm, just the particular quality of someone who has adjusted their alertness without adjusting their posture."He's not here," Rafe said."When will he be back?""Few days.

45

Jax came back on Thursday evening.He rode in at dusk, the bike announcing itself on the gravel with the particular note it made at low speed — a sound I had catalogued without meaning to, the way you catalogue things that matter. I heard it from the cabin and came out because I had been waiting, though I had been careful not to let the waiting become something I acknowledged even to myself.He saw me first.The look we exchanged across the lot was brief and complete — the compressed communication of two people who have been in each other's orbit long enough to say several things without saying any of them. He looked tired. He looked like someone who had done a difficult thing and was back on the other side of it. He looked, underneath all of that, like himself, which was what I had needed to confirm.He nodded.I nodded back.Then I saw him clock something behind me, and his face changed.I turned.Delia Cruz was standing in the garage doorway.The expression that moved through his f

46

I didn't pull away dramatically.I want to be clear about that, because the version of myself I most wanted to avoid becoming was the version who made things into scenes — who performed feelings rather than having them, who used visible retreat as a way of communicating hurt rather than just dealing with it privately and getting on with the work.I had been that person at the altar. Standing in white while the room watched, unable to move, my stillness a performance of composure that was actually paralysis. I was done with that version.What I did instead was simpler and, I think, more honest: I put more space between myself and Jax without announcing that I was doing it, I worked longer hours, and I slept earlier, and I gave myself the room to feel whatever I was feeling without requiring an audience for it.It was not nothing. The thing I was feeling was not nothing.I had been careful. I had been extraordinarily careful, in fact — the cookout on the steps, the particular moment whe

47

Mateo arrived with Delia two days later.He was small. Serious. Dark-eyed in a way that was more watchful than shy — the particular quality of a child who has learned that paying attention to new environments is more useful than trusting them immediately. He held Delia's hand crossing the gravel lot and looked at the bikes with an expression that was purely, unambiguously interested.Children and machinery had a direct relationship that adults tended to complicate.I was at the side bay working on a carburettor when they arrived. I stayed where I was. Not from avoidance — I had decided, overnight, that I was not going to manage my own behaviour around this situation in ways that required performance. I was going to be in the garage because the garage was where I worked. If that meant being present for things I found difficult, then I was present for things I found difficult.Jax came out of the main bay.He crouched down to Mateo's level, which was a decision that took nothing from hi

48

Ghost disappeared for forty-eight hours on a Wednesday.This was not, in itself, alarming. Ghost's relationship to the garage was more like weather than employment — he appeared, he worked, he was indispensable in ways that were easy to overlook until he wasn't there, and occasionally he was not there. Nobody asked where he went. Nobody tracked his movements. He had arrived at Cliff's End on his own terms and remained on those terms and the crew had collectively decided this was acceptable because Ghost was Ghost and some accommodations were worth making.But this absence had a different quality.He left on a Wednesday morning — I saw him go, early, before the garage properly opened, his bike heading north on the coast road at a speed that was not Sunday-ride speed. He had something in the inner pocket of his jacket, a bulk that pressed against the leather in the way of an envelope or a folder.He was going somewhere specific. He was going to find out something.He came back Friday mo

49

I was not in the room.I want to be clear about that because I think it matters — I was not there, and I made the choice not to be there, and the choice was deliberate rather than accidental. Jax had said he would handle it alone, and I had understood that he was right, and respecting that was both correct and, for me, genuinely difficult.I knew the shape of what happened from what he told me afterward, and from Rafe, who had been near enough to hear the beginning of it before he made himself scarce.Jax found Delia that evening in the garage office, where Marge had been housing her with the tight-lipped hospitality of someone doing what was necessary and not what was wanted.He set the clinic documents on the table.He did not accuse. He did not escalate. He laid the documents in front of her and waited, in the same patient, unhurried way he did everything, for the situation to resolve itself.Delia looked at the documents.Then she looked at Jax.And she broke.Not dramatically — R

50

I had been preparing to lose again.I didn't know it while I was doing it. That's the thing about protective withdrawal — it disguises itself as pragmatism, as realism, as the wise management of expectations. You tell yourself: I'm not assuming anything, I'm keeping myself clear, I'm not reading into things that may not be there. And all of that is technically true and also entirely a lie, because underneath the technical truth is something simpler and less admirable: you are already mourning a thing that hasn't been lost yet because the anticipation of loss is more manageable than the loss itself.I had learned this at the altar.I had stood there in white with my chest caving in and I had made myself stay composed and I had told myself this was strength, and it wasn't. It was the pre-emptive management of grief. It was loss that I had started absorbing before it fully arrived, so that when it did arrive I could be the person who handled it rather than the person who was destroyed by

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