I meant to stop after that.
I meant to go back to the Broken Antler and pour coffee and fold napkins and keep my good hands under my apron where they belonged. I meant to read the paper every morning over Hollis's shoulder and wait for the news of the thread I'd pulled. A death somewhere. A disaster. The bill, coming due.
And I did all of those things. I read every page of the paper every morning. I listened to every conversation at the counter. I flinched every time the bell rang.
But I also went back to the garage.
* * *
I told myself it was necessary. That was the word I used. Necessary. I had healed Gary Pell, and Gary had killed a woman. I had healed Ray Tolliver, and Ray had killed a woman. I had healed Kade Wilton with more of myself than I had ever given anyone, and I didn't know anything about him except that he read Marcus Aurelius and fixed strangers' cars and had his father's eyes, or a dead man's eyes, or maybe just his own.
What if he was another Ray? What if there was something in him I couldn't see, something waiting? I had to know. I had to watch. If I'd made another mistake, I needed to see it coming.
That was what I told myself.
* * *
The first day, I sat on a bench at a bus stop across the road from the garage for three hours with a library book I didn't read.
He moved slowly that first week. You could see it in how he lowered himself onto the creeper, the flat board on wheels that mechanics lie on to slide under cars, and in how he got up again, one hand braced on the bumper. He was bruised and stiff. He should have been in bed. He wasn't. He had a whole lot full of cars, and people who needed them.
A woman came by a little after ten, in scrubs, with a toddler on her hip and another little boy hanging onto her pant leg. Her car was a dented blue sedan that had been sitting in the lot since before the accident. I couldn't hear what they said. I watched her open her wallet. I watched Kade shake his head. I watched her try again, holding out a few folded bills, and him gently push her hand back toward her, and say something that made her cover her face with her free hand. Then he crouched down, carefully, wincing a little, and talked to the little boy for a while. He handed the boy something. A shiny bolt, I think. The boy held it up to the light like it was treasure.
The woman drove away in the blue sedan. She was crying. Not sad crying. The other kind.
* * *
The second day, a dog showed up.
It was a scruffy brown mutt with one ear that stood up and one that didn't, thin enough that I could count its ribs from across the road. It slunk along the edge of the gravel lot, sniffing at the base of the cars, and I watched Kade notice it. He didn't call to it. He didn't try to grab it. He went inside, and came back out with something in a paper wrapper, and set it on the ground at the edge of the lot, and went back to work without looking at the dog at all.
The dog crept up. Ate. Backed away. Lay down in the sun near the bay door with its chin on its paws and watched him.
By the fourth day, the dog was sleeping on an old blanket just inside the bay, and Kade was calling it Lug Nut.
* * *
The fifth day, I followed him.
I'm not proud of it. I had no right. But at five o'clock he pulled the bay doors down and locked them, and instead of going inside to the little apartment I'd figured out he lived in, above the office at the back of the building, he climbed into his dented black truck and drove away, and some part of me that I didn't understand needed to know where he was going.
I didn't have a car. I didn't know how to drive one. But Sari had taught me to use the map on my cracked phone, and I'd learned that Kalispell, for all its sprawl, wasn't very big. I walked fast. By the time I found his truck, it was parked at the edge of a cemetery on the north side of town, on a hill with big old trees and the mountains standing behind it, and he was sitting on the grass beside a flat gray stone.
I stayed back behind a tree, far enough that he couldn't see me.
He didn't do anything. That was what got me. He didn't cry or talk out loud or leave flowers. He just sat there, with his arms around his knees, while the sun went down over the valley and turned everything gold. After a while he pulled the battered paperback out of his jacket and read for a little while. Then he closed it and sat some more.
Before he left, he reached out and brushed some grass clippings off the stone with the side of his hand, the way you'd brush crumbs off a friend's shirt.
When he was gone, I walked over and read it.
DANIEL JAMES WILTON. BELOVED FATHER. HE FIXED WHAT HE COULD.
I stood there for a long time.
* * *
"He asked about you," Sari said.
It was the end of the week. She'd taken her Civic to the garage on Wednesday, the one that clicked at her. I had not gone with her. I had made an excuse so bad that she'd just looked at me for a long moment and said, "Okay, Bell," in a voice that meant she didn't believe a word.
"What did he say?" I asked.
"He fixed my starter. For, like, nothing. Honestly I think he lost money. And he had this dog, this really ugly sweet dog, and I'm pretty sure he's got half the town on a payment plan." She was rolling silverware into napkins in the back booth. She wasn't looking at me. She was being very casual. Sari was terrible at being casual. "And then right when I was leaving, he said, 'How's Eva?'"
My heart did something complicated.
"Just like that. 'How's Eva?' Like it was nothing. And I said fine. And he said, 'She doesn't come by.' And I said she's been busy. And he said, 'Tell her I'm not mad about the coffeepot.'" Sari finally looked up at me. "What's going on with you two?"
"Nothing," I said.
"Eva," Sari said.
"Nothing. I swear. We've talked twice," I said.
"You were holding him in the street. You were covered in his blood." She put down the silverware. "And now you're sneaking around like—" She stopped. Her eyes narrowed. "Oh my God. You've been going over there."
My face went hot. My ears went hot. Every part of me went hot at once.
"Oh my God," Sari said, delighted and appalled. "You've been stalking him."
"Bus bench? Across the road? With a book?" Sari asked.
I stared at her. "How did you—"
"I drive past that bench every day to get here, babe." She put her head in her hands. "You are the worst spy in the history of the world."
* * *
I knew. By the end of that week, I knew, the way you know a wound is closing. Not a thought, but a certainty, deep in my hands.
Kade Wilton wasn't Ray Tolliver. He wasn't Gary Pell. There was nothing dark waiting in him that I couldn't see. He was exactly what he looked like: a kind, tired, stubborn young man who'd given up his whole future to keep his father's garage alive, and who couldn't stop himself from fixing every broken thing that landed in his lot. Cars. Dogs. Single mothers with no money. Strangers with dead batteries.
He was good. He was good all the way down.
I hadn't made a mistake.
The relief was so big it felt like falling.
And somewhere in that week, sitting on that bus bench, watching him lie on his back on the creeper with his arms up inside some old truck's engine and Lug Nut asleep against his leg, the relief turned into something else. Something I didn't have a name for. Something that made my chest ache in a way that had nothing to do with healing.
I'd watched humans fall in love for six hundred years.
It had never once occurred to me what it felt like from the inside.
* * *
On Saturday afternoon, I was on the bench again. Same book. Same spot.
The bay door was open. Lug Nut was asleep in a patch of sun. Kade was at a workbench at the back of the garage, his back to me, doing something with a part I couldn't see.
And then he set it down, and he turned around, and he walked out of the bay into the gravel lot and stopped and looked across the road.
Straight at me.
I froze.
He didn't call out. He didn't wave. He just stood there in the sun with his hands in his pockets and his bruises gone yellow at the edges, and he looked at me for a long, long moment.
Then he lifted one hand. Slowly. Hello.
I grabbed my book, and I ran.