“No.”
“Less fun.”
I watched the valley instead of her. Heat shimmered above the thorn trees now, flattening the far ridge into a silver blur. A truck rattled somewhere near the service buildings.
“My wife got tired of being married to a man who was always somewhere else,” I said.
Juliette didn’t respond immediately. No sympathy face. No softening. Just a stillness that waited without pressing.
I set the mug down. “She wasn’t wrong,” I said.
Juliette’s fingers tightened once around the notebook, then eased. “No,” she said. “She probably wasn’t.”
The honesty in it should have irritated me.
It didn’t.
A generator coughed somewhere behind the kitchen, caught, then steadied.
Juliette’s eyes shifted toward the sound. “That would be your voltage issue.”
I stood. “That would be maintenance pretending it fixed itself.”
She rose too.
“You’re not invited,” I said.
“I’m aware.”
She fell into step beside me anyway. Gravel crunched under our boots as we crossed the service yard.
Mandla, our head mechanic, looked up from the side panel with a wrench in one hand and judgment in both eyes.
“You brought the lawyer,” he said.
“She followed me.”
“Worse.”
Juliette offered him a cool nod. “I prefer consultant.”
“That’s worse,” Mandla muttered, turning back to the open housing.
She almost smiled.
I stepped beside him and looked into the machine. Belts. Vibration. A regulator that had started making a dry metallic chatter it hadn’t earned.
“What’s it doing?”
“Cut under load,” he said. “Then it behaves again as soon as anyone respectable looks at it.”
“Loose connection?”
“Maybe. Maybe old age.”
Juliette moved to the doorway, staying clear of the work space without being told. Smart.
The generator thudded through the floor and into the walls, making the air vibrate. Sun hammered the tin roof overhead. Diesel and heat sat heavy at the back of the throat. The air was thick enough to chew, a cocktail of friction and failing mechanics.
