RILEY
Mara found out about my father on a Tuesday.
I hadn't planned on telling her — not yet, not before I'd fully processed it myself. But Mara had twenty years of reading my silences and she'd been watching me for three weeks with the compressed-lips expression and finally she walked into the shop on a Tuesday and said: "What happened."
I told her.
We were on the floor of bay two again — our floor, the floor of serious conversations, backs against the workbench with coffees between us. She listened through the whole thing without interrupting, which she only did when something was genuinely significant, and when I finished she was quiet for a long time.
"He was thirty-two," she said finally. "When he died."
"Yes."
"Younger than we are now."
"Yes."
She turned the coffee cup in
