His Chubby Obsession

Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Garage

I went back to work the next morning anyway.

Diane had told me there was nothing useful I could do in the immediate hours after the filing — no papers to sign yet, no hearing date confirmed beyond "within the week" — and staying in the house all day, waiting for the next piece of bad news to land, felt like exactly the kind of paralysis I'd promised myself I was done with. So I drove to the garage, sat down at my folding table in the corner office, and lost myself in invoices and receipts, grateful for numbers that behaved predictably in a week where nothing else did.

Enzo found me there around noon, leaning in the doorway with two sandwiches from the place down the street, watching me for a moment before I noticed him.

"You didn't have to come in today," he said.

"I wanted to." I closed the ledger, rubbing my eyes. "It's the only thing that's felt like mine all morning."

He set the sandwich down in front of me, and I caught the small, careful pride in the way he was looking at me — not the protective, watchful pride from the safe house, something different, something that looked more like respect than concern.

"You're good at this," he said, nodding at the neat columns I'd built out of what used to be a shoebox. "Tiny said the invoicing's never made sense to him in fifteen years of running this place."

"I'm good at making order out of things nobody else wants to sort through." I managed a small, tired smile. "Turns out that's a useful skill, even outside of marriage counseling for men who never once actually listened."

He almost laughed at that, and something in the warmth of it steadied me more than the sandwich did.

—

I was at the front counter an hour later, covering while one of the mechanics ran a part to the paint shop, when the bell over the door chimed and a woman in a tailored blazer walked in, car keys in hand, looking around the garage with the mild, distracted air of someone who did not usually find herself in places like this.

"I have an appointment," she said. "Oil change, I think. Under Reeves."

I pulled up the schedule, found the name, smiled the polite, practiced smile I'd once perfected for Bruce's business dinners and had thought I'd never need again. "Ten more minutes, they're just finishing up the car ahead of you."

She nodded, drifted toward the small waiting area, picked up a magazine, set it back down, and then looked at me again — really looked, the way people look when something's tugging at their memory and they haven't yet placed why.

"You look familiar," she said slowly. "Have we met somewhere?"

My stomach dropped, cold and immediate. I kept my expression carefully neutral, the way Sofia had coached me. "I don't think so."

"No, I — " Her eyes narrowed slightly, and I watched, in real time, the exact moment recognition finally clicked into place behind them. "You're her. From the news. The Spears woman. The one they said ran off with — " Her gaze flicked, involuntarily, toward the open bay doors, toward the leather-vested men working on cars beyond them, toward the whole visible, undeniable shape of the world I'd apparently disappeared into.

I had maybe two seconds to decide who I was going to be in this exact moment.

The old version of me — the one who'd spent five years shrinking, apologizing, managing other people's discomfort before it could turn into anything worse — would have laughed it off, deflected, maybe even quietly excused herself to the back room until the woman had paid and gone.

I didn't do any of that.

"My name is Emma," I said instead, steady, chin level, exactly the way Sofia had taught me to hold myself at the party. "I work here. That's all you need to know about me to get your oil changed today."

The woman's mouth opened slightly, clearly unprepared for a direct answer instead of an evasive one. "I only meant — I read that you'd, well, kidnapped your own daughter, and — "

"I left an abusive marriage and took my daughter somewhere safe," I said, calm, clear, the words coming out easier than I expected, like I'd been rehearsing them without realizing it. "You're welcome to believe whichever version of that story you prefer. But I'd ask you not to say the other one in my place of work, in front of the people who've actually shown me and my daughter kindness this past week, when the man you're quoting hasn't shown either of us a shred of it in five years."

The silence that followed felt enormous, the woman staring at me with an expression caught somewhere between embarrassment and grudging reassessment, one of the mechanics pausing mid-motion in the bay behind me, clearly having heard every word.

"I — I didn't mean to be rude," the woman finally said, quieter now. "I'm sorry. That's not — that's none of my business, I suppose."

"No," I agreed, not unkindly. "It isn't."

She paid for her oil change in near silence when it was finished, and left without meeting my eyes again, and the moment the bell over the door stopped ringing behind her, I let out a breath I felt like I'd been holding for five entire years, not just the last two minutes.

—

Enzo was leaning against the doorframe of the office when I turned around, arms crossed, an expression on his face I hadn't seen from him before — not the careful, watchful concern I'd grown used to, something warmer, something that looked, unmistakably, like he was seeing me clearly for the first time in a way that had nothing to do with danger at all.

"You handled that," he said quietly.

"I did." I felt something unfamiliar settle into my chest, solid and warm, the particular satisfaction of a battle fought entirely on my own terms and won. "I didn't run. I didn't apologize for existing. I just told the truth and let her decide what to do with it."

"That's not nothing, Emma."

"No," I said, echoing my own words back at that stranger without meaning to. "It isn't."

He held my gaze a beat longer than the moment strictly required, something unspoken passing between us that neither of us seemed quite ready to name out loud yet, and I found myself, for the first time since that dark road and the swerving motorcycle, genuinely unafraid of whatever might be building between us.