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I snap on gloves.

The machine starts with a familiar buzz, filling the room with purpose.

Briggs exhales as the needle hits skin.

Pain changes people’s breathing. The honest kind does, anyway. Controlled at first, then deeper as the body accepts what’s happening. Briggs barely reacts, but I hear the shift.

“You thinking about Ben?” he asks after a while.

My hand doesn’t falter. That’s discipline. “No more than usual.”

“So yes.”

I wipe ink and plasma from his skin. “You’re chatty today.”

“You came back weird.”

“I came back tired.”

“You came back haunted.”

I almost laugh. “Brother, I left haunted.”

That shuts him up.

For a few minutes there’s only the machine, the soft music playing from the old speaker in the corner, and rain ticking against the front windows.

Redwood Run rain is different from city rain. City rain feels dirty, impatient. Here, it stays, soaking the forest until every board and branch carries its weight.

Ben used to say the town would grow over you if you stood still too long.

Then he stopped moving altogether.

My thumb brushes my own wrist again before I catch myself. I keep working.

Ben Sterling laughed loudly and rode wildly. He joined our lives sideways. One day he was just there, under a busted bike at Last Mile Garage with Wayne yelling at him and Briggs pretending not to like him.

He became ours before any of us admitted it.

Club member. Brother. Idiot. Light source.

Dead at twenty-five because of a wet road, a sharp curve, and bad luck. I pull a clean line through Briggs’s skin.

“This sister being missing,” Briggs says, “made you think of him?”

I don’t answer right away. Because, yes, everything in Redwood Run makes me think of him if I let it.

“Maybe,” I say. “Let’s just hope this doesn’t end the same way.”

CHAPTER THREE

Laurel

The house looks exactly the same.

Places should have the decency to change when you do. They should sag, peel, collapse, reinvent themselves… something. They shouldn't sit there at the end of a cracked driveway with the same sloped roof, the same narrow porch, the same moss pushing green fingers up between the stones like no one ever left.

Like Ben never died.