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Home / Romance / Love On Two Wheels / Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

All Chapters of Love On Two Wheels : Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

80 Chapters

71

She died on a Friday morning.Jax got the call from Birch at seven forty-five, which was early enough that I was still in the cabin making coffee. I heard the change in the quality of his voice from the lot — not words, just the register — and I put down the mug and crossed the gravel.He was outside the garage, phone to his ear, facing the coast road. I came and stood beside him without touching him, close enough that he would know I was there.He said yes. He said thank you. He ended the call.He stood for a moment looking at the road."She's gone," he said."Yes," I said.We stood for a while.The morning was doing what mornings did here — building slowly from the grey of early light toward something more definite, the sky making decisions about whether to be clear or covered, the coastal air carrying the salt smell that I had stopped noticing except at moments like this one when something pulled you back into your senses.I did not tell him I was sorry. I had learned, in the weeks

72

He told me on a Sunday afternoon.We were doing a ride together — not Jax and me, not the crew, just Rafe and me — the kind of ride that had become occasional and comfortable over the months, two people who had discovered they worked at compatible speeds and didn't need to talk constantly to make good use of a road.We pulled over at a diner about thirty miles south — a genuine highway diner, the kind with counter seating and coffee that had clearly been sitting since morning and was served anyway with the confidence of an institution that knew its audience.We ordered. We ate.At some point — after the food but before the coffee was fully unpleasant — Rafe said: "I want to tell you something."I set down my mug."When I came to Cliff's End," he said, "I was running." He said this without the weight that the admission might have carried elsewhere — not confessing, not burdening, just stating. "I'd been working in a garage in another city. The owner had been cutting corners on parts fo

73

Sadie called on a Monday morning.Her voice had a quality I had only heard once before — the controlled, compressed quality of someone who has received information that they have been working toward for a long time and are managing the specific satisfaction of it in the professional register, because the professional register is what the moment requires."Federal charges have been filed," she said. "Darren Blackwell. PAC fraud, campaign finance violations, wire fraud. Three counts."I sat down.I was in the garage office, where I had been updating the foundation's preliminary documentation on my laptop. The morning was ordinary around me — the sounds of the garage, the radio, the smell of coffee from the machine down the hall."Vanessa?" I asked."Separate proceedings. She cooperated with the investigators against the people above her in the network. The state attorneys are deciding on her charges separately from the federal case. She's going to face consequences — I want to be clear

74

Mouse got the offer on a Wednesday.He came to find me in the garage rather than Jax, which I noted and which told me something about how things had shifted over the months. He sat on the stool at the end of my bench and put his laptop on his knees and turned it toward me without saying anything, which was his version of leading with evidence.A job offer. A serious one — a cybersecurity firm that I recognised from the documentation work we had done together, a firm that appeared in the public record as a contractor to several federal agencies and whose reputation was, Mouse had told me weeks ago during an unrelated conversation, exactly where he wanted to end up.Full-time. Significant salary. Remote-capable with occasional travel."Jax arranged this," I said.Mouse looked at me."The introduction," I said. "He mentioned it months ago. He said he had a door.""Yes," Mouse said.He looked at the laptop screen."You want to take it," I said."Yes," he said."Then take it," I said.He l

75

We had our first real argument on a Tuesday.Not about the investigation, not about the garage or the crew or any of the things that had generated friction in the early weeks. About something smaller and therefore more representative — the kind of argument that comes when two people are close enough that the ordinary friction of their personalities has real surfaces to work against.It was about the foundation curriculum.I had been developing the programme design for several weeks, and I had arrived at a structure I thought was solid. Communication modules, project management frameworks, client relationship fundamentals — the things I knew how to teach because I had built them myself. The professional side of the apprenticeship, designed to complement the mechanical training the affiliated garages would provide.I had presented it to Jax.He had listened, and then he had said: "It's too corporate."I had looked at him."The language," he said. "Client relationship fundamentals. Proje

76

The Cole Wolfe Foundation was formally registered on a Thursday in late autumn.I know the season because of the specific quality of the light that day — the low, slanted autumn light of the coastal region that turned everything amber in the late afternoon, particularly the garage metal, which caught it and held it in a way that looked almost deliberate.Jax signed the final documents at the cabin table.I was across from him, not because I needed to be there for the signing but because he had asked me to be, simply and without explanation, and I had come.Birch was present by video — a small square in the corner of the laptop screen, professional and efficient, providing the legal confirmation that the signatures were being properly witnessed and the foundation formally established.It took eleven minutes.Afterward, Birch said congratulations and signed off and the screen went dark.Jax sat at the table with the pen in his hand.I looked at the documents. At the foundation's name at

77

It was ready on a Monday in late November.I had been working on it for nearly three months — not continuously, not to the exclusion of everything else, but steadily, the way you work on something that is both a job and something more than a job. The Indian had come in as a customer rebuild, referred through one of the garage's regular contacts, but somewhere in the process of taking it apart and understanding what it needed and putting it back together with the care that the structure deserved, it had become something I was invested in.Good machines, my father had said. A kept promise.The final check took two hours on the Monday morning. I went through every system — the fuel, the electrics, the brakes, the suspension, the chain tension. I consulted the notes I had kept through the rebuild, checking that every decision made along the way had been executed correctly and that nothing had been assumed rather than confirmed.It was right. All of it.I kicked it over.The engine caught

78

The conversation happened on a Friday night in December.Not a planned conversation — none of the important ones had been planned. It arrived the way things arrived between us: in the ordinary flow of an evening that had started as an ordinary evening and then become something else because the conditions were right and we had both stopped waiting for a better moment.We were in the cabin. Not the garage — the cabin, which had shifted in status over the months from the place I slept to the place we spent evenings when the work was done. He was reading something on his phone, I was sketching the next phase of the foundation curriculum in a notebook, and the radio was playing at a volume that was ambient rather than intentional.He set down his phone.I looked up.He looked at me with the full, unhurried attention that I had come to understand as his mode of saying: I'm going to say something that matters."I want to tell you something," he said."All right," I said."When you arrived,"

79

January arrived with the cold that the coastal region produced in its own specific way — not the hard, pressing cold of inland winters but something more lateral, the cold that came off the water and moved through you rather than against you, the cold that got into the garage despite the heating and required an extra layer at the bench.I had been at Cliff's End for seven months.The federal case against Darren had proceeded through its institutional stages with the measured pace that institutions maintained regardless of external pressure. He had entered a guilty plea in December — three counts, the exact charges filed in November. The sentencing was pending. Vanessa's proceedings were separate and still underway, her cooperation having narrowed her exposure but not eliminated it.Pryce had been charged. His attorney was doing what attorneys did.The record of my company's involvement had been formally corrected in every relevant filing. The professional damage was documented and ack

80

We left on a Saturday morning at seven.The garage was quiet when we went — the crew would open it later, Marge had the schedule, the work would continue in the way it continued when we weren't there, which was a thing I had come to trust and which still struck me occasionally as a specific kind of miracle. The place ran because of what had been built into it. Not because of any one person's constant presence.My father's bike and Jax's, side by side in the lot while we loaded.Not much to load. A change of clothes each, the tools we each carried as a matter of habit, the kind of kit that said: we expect to handle what comes up. My father's letter in my jacket pocket. Jax had something in his — he didn't say what, and I didn't ask, and we both understood that there were things you carried that belonged to you alone and that this understanding was itself a form of intimacy.The morning was the winter kind — cold and clear, the sky a particular pale blue that meant the day was going to

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