"This town is a mistake."
"Welcome home."
"This is not home. Home has air conditioning. Home has reasonable temperatures that don't make you want to die. Home doesn't require you to drink your weight in water just to survive until sunset."
I'm about to continue my heat-induced rant when cold presses against my arm.
I yelp, jerking upright, and find Holt standing there. Right there, closer than expected, suddenly in my space. He's holding a water bottle—condensation forming on the plastic, droplets running down the sides—and he tosses it. I catch it on reflex.
"Drink it," he says. His voice is low, quieter than usual. "You haven't had water in two hours."
I blink at him. At the cold bottle in my hands. At him standing there watching me, grease on his forearms, hair damp with sweat, completely serious. "How do you—"
"I'm paying attention."
There it is again. That phrase. He walks away before I can respond, before I can process what it means that he's been tracking my water intake in between fixing cars and running a business and doing whatever else he does all day.
I sit there with the cold bottle, pressing it against my forehead, my neck, my wrists where my pulse hammers. That warmth in my chest grows, spreads, settles deeper somewhere behind my ribs. Roots itself in a place I didn't know was empty until something filled it.
He's paying attention. To me. Not just whether I'm doing my job or filing things correctly. To whether I'm drinking water. Whether I'm okay. Whether I need something I haven't asked for.
Finn catches my eye from across the garage. Grins. Mouths: told you so.
I unscrew the bottle and drink. The water's cold enough to hurt, perfect, exactly what I needed.
By five I'm exhausted in a good way. Accomplished exhausted. The kind that comes from doing something productive instead of just surviving. Instead of running.
Finn starts shutting down—music cutting off, tools getting put away in places they probably don't belong but at least they're off the floor. I finish filing the last invoice, wipe down the desk that's now actually functional, turn off the computer that I learned how to use approximately six hours ago. I look at my work and feel something close to pride.
The desk is organized. Invoices filed in a system that makes sense. Phone calls answered without major incident. The bucket incident notwithstanding, I didn't destroy anything irreplaceable.
"You survived," Finn says, appearing at my desk. "Congratulations. You made it through day one withoutgetting fired, injured, or buried under invoices. That's basically winning."
I slump dramatically, every muscle protesting. "Barely."
"You did good, Gremlin. Really." He's sincere now, the humor dropping away. "You made it through the first day. That's something. That's everything, actually."
Holt appears, wiping grease off his hands with a rag that's probably making them worse. He looks at the desk—takes a long moment to assess it, his eyes moving over the organized files and labeled folders—and nods once.
That single nod feels like winning a prize. Like accomplishing something huge. Like mattering.
"Tomorrow," he says. Just that. "Seven AM."
"I'll be here."
He heads for the stairs and I watch him go, watch the way he moves—that slight hesitation in his stride, the careful weight distribution, the way he favors his left side just barely. The prosthetic. The pain. The couch.
All of it my fault.
By the time I climb the stairs, I'm so tired I can barely think. My legs are shaking. My feet hurt. My brain feels like static. Holt's already up there—I can hear the shower running, water hitting tile. I collapse into a chair at the small table and just breathe.
The shower cuts off. Holt emerges, hair damp and dark, clean t-shirt soft and worn, smelling like soap and something clean. He sees me sprawled in the chair like I've been murdered and his face does a complicated thing—concern flickering across it before smoothing out, relief maybe that I made it through, something else I can't read.
"You did fine today," he says.
I look up. "Yeah?"
"Yeah."
