Page 43 of Shattered Promise

I dig my phone from my pocket, thumb over to the playlist I built for working in the shop—high-energy, low-lyric, mostly classic rock with a few guilty-pleasure pop songs hidden in the middle. I don’t trust her not to sneak in here and catch me belting along to the Spice Girls, so I keep the volume just high enough to mask the silence but not loud enough to drown out her voice if she yells for me.

I line up the next set of spark plugs, hands moving on their own. Even after all these years, the muscle memory’s still there: break the seal, check the gap, thread it in by hand before finishing with the ratchet. I can feel the tension in my shoulders start to loosen, the tightness in my chest fading out to a dull, workable hum. Out here, with the weight of the engine in front of me and the music in my ears, it’s easier to forget everything except the task at hand.

Except I can’t. Not really.

Because every few minutes, I catch myself glancing back to the house, waiting for a sign. A laugh. A cry. The scrape of her feet on the gravel, or the sound of her voice calling out for help. But the house is quiet, and the only thing I hear is the wind and the music and my own breath, steady and slow.

After half an hour, I realize I’ve been staring at the same spark plug for five solid minutes, thinking about her laugh, her hands, the way she looked at my son. The way she looked at me when she thought I wasn’t paying attention.

I stand back, flex my fingers, and try to shake it off. It’s no use. She’s in my head. Worse: I like it.

It’s not that I don’t trust her—I do. More than I probably should.

But handing over care of my son feels like releasing a grip I’ve been white-knuckling since the day he was placed in my arms.

And it’s not about trust. It’s about how fucking well she fits in. How effortless she makes it look, Iike she’s been here for months and not days.

And the realization has sunk its claws into me without any release in sight.

Because I remember how it felt the last time I thought I could keep her.

I lean over the engine, pick up a wrench, and try to fall back into routine. Bolts, threads, muscle memory. But my hands feel heavy, my thoughts distracted. The minutes stretch until I start wondering what she’s doing again. If Theo’s curled into her lap, if she’s got him wrapped against her like she did the other day, all soft voice and steady hands.

I last ten more minutes before I cave. I’m halfway to the door when it opens.

She steps into the barn carrying two glasses of lemonade, one tucked to her chest, the other held out toward me. “This was inyour fridge,” she says. “I added honey from your pantry. Hope that’s okay.”

I take the glass, fingertips brushing hers. Her skin is cool from the glass, but her hand’s warm underneath.

“Theo napping?” I ask, nodding toward the monitor clipped to her back pocket.

She nods, a proud smile ghosting over her mouth. “He went down easy. I think I cracked your son’s nap code. At least for this week.” She leans against the workbench, hip cocked, and eyes me with an expression I can’t read. “So you traded your race car for a pickup, bought an old ranch, and turned a barn into a garage.” She pauses, tilting her head toward Theo’s area. “And a baby area.”

I lift a shoulder. “It wasn’t a race car, but yeah.”

She sips her lemonade, gaze flicking down to her feet and then back up with a smirk. “I mean, you raced in that car, didn’t you?”

I look at her. I mean really look, because she’s inviting it, and for a second the air feels ripe with tension. “Sometimes,” I concede.

“You remember that one night at the Alley?”

The Alley is an abandoned race track that Beau and Graham reclaimed. Now it serves as the center of all things in the underground racing community that hangs out in the shadows of our small town. Graham put some serious tech behind the races and handles all the money.

Years ago, when I still raced, I could pull upper five figures on an especially good tournament weekend. But that’s all behind me now.

“I remember a lot of nights at The Alley.” It comes out half a dare, half a confession.

She grins, slow and wicked, and the memory flickers behind her eyes. “What about the night you bet Beau you could break the track record and then ate shit on the second lap?”

I can’t help it—I laugh. It’s a sharp, real sound, and it echoes off the walls. “I didn’t eat shit. I just . . . lost traction.”

She tilts her head, mouth twisting into something fond and incredulous. “You spun out, Mason. I was there, remember? We all saw it.”

I shrug, but she’s already laughing, her whole body shaking with it. “You made us all get out and push the damn car off the infield.”

“Only because I didn’t want to call a tow,” I protest, but she just grins, and there’s so much light in her expression that I swear something inside me shifts on its axis. Like a planet rolling back toward the sun.

We fall into that old rhythm for a while, swapping stories about high school, about the wild Carter dinners and the time Beau tried to build a potato cannon in the garage and blew out the back window. She remembers details I haven’t thought about in years—how Cora once convinced Beau to eat a whole jar of pickled eggs, how I got my first black eye not from fighting but from taking a wiffle ball straight to the face at one of their epic backyard tournaments. She keeps looking at me like she’s waiting for me to cut off our conversation.

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