Chapter 6 Chapter 6

Roan POV

I don't remember the drive to the shop. Not really. My head's still back in that kitchen, back in the two seconds where Wren looked at me like she meant every word and I didn't have a single good reason left to pretend she didn't.

That's kind of the problem.

I actually said that out loud. Six years of careful, deliberate distance, and I undid it over cold eggs on a Tuesday morning because I couldn't make myself lie to her face one more time.

I should've said less. Or nothing. I've never been good at knowing where the line is with Wren, when to be the guy who drives two hours to fix her flat, and when to be smart enough to stay out of a kitchen before eight in the morning when neither of us has our guard up yet. She's always come to me first, for as long as I can remember. Not Deacon, not Priya. Me. It used to just feel like trust. Lately it feels like something with more weight to it, and I don't know what to do with that weight except keep trying to set it down somewhere and watching it not stay put.

The shop's already loud when I pull in, Metallica bleeding out of the bay doors, air tools going. My brother Dax opens most mornings because he's a functioning human being before nine and I am not, not since I started running on four hours of sleep and whatever's left over after a night of thinking too hard.

The shop was my father's before it was ours. Thomas Ashworth built it from nothing, the kind of man who loved exactly two things with his whole chest: my mother, and bikes, in that order, no contest, ever. He used to say if you can't fix something with your hands you don't really understand it yet, and he lived by that rule right up until the morning his heart gave out on the shop floor twelve years ago, wrench still in his hand.

I was twenty-four. Oldest of three. That morning I went from being a guy who played guitar in a band that was two months from a record deal to being the guy responsible for a business, a grieving mother, and two younger siblings who all needed somebody to not fall apart. So I didn't. Callum was nineteen then, still finding his footing, still leaning on me for everything, right up until four years later when I couldn't keep him safe either.

I don't let myself go all the way down that road most mornings. Just far enough to remember why I do things the way I do them.

I stepped back from the band the day of the funeral and never stepped back in. Deacon and the rest of them went on to build something real out of what we'd started not famous, not a record deal, but a working band with a local following and a residency at the same bar every third Friday, good enough that I still hear our old songs on their setlist sometimes and feel something complicated about it. I got a small cut of the publishing on two tracks we wrote together back when we were twenty-two and thought we had all the time in the world. It buys me nothing I actually want.

In the space of about six months I went from a guy who lived out of a duffel bag and didn't own a single piece of furniture, to a guy who owned a mortgage, a payroll, and a mother who needed help remembering how to function without her husband. Funny how fast a life can turn over.

Inside, my brother Dax is elbow-deep in an engine rebuild, and our cousin Reyes handles the custom paint and pinstriping in the back bay. We've got a part-timer, Booker, who fills in on weekends. Dad's rule, still standing: cruisers and vintage restorations only. No crotch rockets, no scooters, no exceptions, not once in twelve years, because some rules are worth keeping just because they're the last thing somebody left you.

Most mornings start the same. I lock myself in the office and deal with the invoices and the ordering, the part of running this place I've never once enjoyed but do anyway because my father did it himself for thirty years and it feels wrong to hand it off. After that I switch over to the other thing that actually keeps me upright some days: the rescue run I started five years ago, half a dozen of us from the shop pairing weekend rides with pulling strays out of kill shelters upstate. It started as an insomnia project, something to do with my hands and my head at three in the morning when the quiet got too loud. It turned into the closest thing I've had to a purpose since I put the guitar down.

I sit at the desk, invoices untouched in front of me, and think about the way Wren said I don't think you're as hard to want as you think you are like it cost her nothing to say, when I know for a fact it cost her plenty.

I've got no idea what I'm supposed to do with that. I've got even less idea how I'm supposed to walk back into that house tonight and pretend I don't.