Chapter 1 Chapter 1

Wren POV

I swing off the back of the motorcycle and drag my fingers through my hair, working out the knots the wind left behind. Two minutes on that thing and my hair turns into something you'd find rolling across a desert highway. Tyler grabs my waist and tugs me in, pressing a flat, hurried kiss to my mouth that tastes more like performance than affection.

"Wren." The voice comes from the garage bay, low and even, which is somehow worse than if he'd shouted. "You know the rules about that bike."

Tyler drops his hands like he's been caught doing something illegal. "Christ. Is that your brother?"

I exhale slowly. Deacon doesn't do driveway confrontations, not the loud kind anyway. That's not his register. "No. That's Roan."

Tyler glances toward the bay, recalculating something behind his eyes. "The Roan who owns half this shop? I think my cousin bought his Sportster off him."

"Probably. He's not my keeper. He just acts like it."

Roan's already crossing the lot, wiping his hands on a shop rag, boots even and unhurried on the gravel, which somehow makes it more unsettling than if he'd rushed. He doesn't raise his voice. He never has to.

"That bike doesn't have a passenger seat rated for anyone, Wren. Not you, not anybody. You know that."

"It was four blocks long."

"Four blocks is how people end up in a ditch." He looks at Tyler for exactly as long as it takes to make his point, then looks away, done with him. "Get home safe."

Tyler mutters something about needing to head out and doesn't so much as glance at me again before pulling off down the road, which tells me everything about how much that almost-relationship was ever going to matter. I sling my bag over my shoulder and start toward the house.

Roan falls into step beside me, not because he needs to say more, but because apparently he's not finished. "You're twenty-four. I know I don't get a vote."

"You say that like it stops you from casting one anyway."

"Force of habit." A ghost of something that isn't quite a smile. "Deacon still thinks you're seventeen. I try not to be as bad as him."

"You're not," I say, and mean it, even though half the time I can't tell if that's a compliment or a problem.

We reach the porch steps and he takes them without slowing, pulling open the screen door before I even catch up, same as he's done since I was in high school and he was already a fixture in this house the guy who showed up after the accident and never really left, who fixed my first car in this driveway, who's been close enough to family that I stopped being able to remember a version of my life without him standing somewhere in the background of it.

Except lately he hasn't felt like a background. Lately he's the first thing I notice walking into a room, which is inconvenient, given that he is my brother's best friend, twelve years older than me, and about as likely to act on it as he is to sell the shop and move to Florida.

Inside, the kitchen looks like a supply run went sideways, bags lined up across the counter, waiting to be put away. Roan does this every couple of weeks, hauls groceries over before the garage's Friday get-together, the loose tradition of bikes and burgers and whoever from the crew wants to show up. It's one of those rhythms the house runs on now, one of the few that never changed after everything else did.

I know I should help unpack. I'm aware of that. But my mood is sitting somewhere under the floorboards, and what I actually need is a door between me and everyone else for twenty minutes.

I duck down the hall, take the stairs two at a time, and close myself in my old room, still technically mine, technically temporary, six weeks into a "temporary" that doesn't feel like it's going anywhere. Shoes off. Flat on my back. Staring at the same water stain on the ceiling that's been there since I was a teenager.

I moved back for a work contract. That's the version I tell people. The truer version is messier: a breakup that made me question every decision I'd made in the four years since college, a layoff two weeks later that made the timing feel less like coincidence and more like the universe telling me to sit still for once. Millhaven Ridge was supposed to be a pause button. A few months, tops.

I didn't factor in the way Roan says my name like it costs him something. I didn't factor in noticing that.

I've never quite fit the mold of most people my age around here, not because anything dramatic happened, just the ordinary strangeness of growing up in a family that lost its center too early. Our parents died when I was sixteen. Deacon was twenty-one and took over the garage overnight because somebody had to, and Roan, who'd buried his own younger brother in a shop accident he still won't talk about, folded himself into our house like it was the only thing keeping either of them upright. He became the guy who showed up. Every time. For six years.

None of that made me reckless. If anything it made me careful in ways most people my age haven't had to learn yet. I was loved completely. Nobody hid the hard parts from me, they just made sure I wasn't carrying them alone. But growing up inside that much grief and that much steadiness at the same time put me somewhere slightly ahead of where I should've been. I sit in rooms with people my age sometimes and feel like I'm watching them through glass.

I figured out early which parts of my life people wanted access to: the garage's local reputation, Deacon's easy charm, the version of "found family" that made good conversation at parties. You learn to read the angle behind the friendliness fast.

So mostly I keep a small orbit. Mari, who's been my person since college and has never once needed anything from me but honesty. Priya, who married into this family with more patience than any of us deserved. And Roan, apparently, who I am absolutely not supposed to be thinking about the way I've been thinking about him since I got back.

Everyone else can wait outside the door a little longer.