Page 34 of Veil of Secrets

I reach back to the workbench, grab a wrench, and toss it underhand.

She catches it without thinking.

She stares at it.

“You think I fix cars now?”

I nod to the open hood. “Try something.”

She steps forward, her eyes never leaving mine until she’s standing beside the car. Then she shifts, looks under the hood, sets the wrench down on the frame.

“What’s the problem?”

“Cracked coil. Intermittent start.”

“Cheap fix,” she mutters, grabbing a rag and wiping her hands before they’ve touched anything. “Lazy diagnosis.”

I say nothing.

She digs into the engine. Fingers trail wires, checking connections. Methodical. She doesn’t ask questions. Just starts working like it’s second nature. I half expect her to swear at it, but she’s quiet.

Focused.

Her hands don’t tremble. Not even when she scrapes her knuckle and blood beads up.

I watch from the side, arms crossed. She’s not doing it to impress me. She’s doing it because it distracts her.

When she’s done, she closes the hood, tosses the wrench onto the bench, and wipes her palms down her thighs.

“Good enough?” she asks.

“Yeah.”

She leans back against the car next to me. The engine ticks from the residual heat of a half-hour test run. Neither of us speaks.

The silence stretches.

Then: “You killed him clean,” she says.

I look at her, but she’s staring ahead, toward the back wall of the garage where the shadows crowd around the toolbox.

“Yeah.”

“You meant for me to see it.”

“I did.”

She pushes off the hood, starts pacing in a slow line near the bench. Her fingers hook under the hem of her shirt, then drop. Restless.

“I hated that you were right,” she says.

“About what?”

“That I needed to watch him die to feel free.”

“You don’t need to hate that.”

She turns. The overhead bulb catches her face in slanted light. Her mouth is drawn tight, but her eyes—they’re alive. Alert. Furious, maybe, but at who, I don’t know.

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