I MARRIED A MECHANIC TO RUIN MY FATHER'S PLAN

Chapter Three - Impact

I don't remember deciding to speed up. There's no clean line between driving and my foot pressing harder against the pedal. The ghost of my father's slap is a faint echo on my face, but the anger is sharper, still hearing the word leverage in his mouth like it was always going to be mine. The road narrows before I notice. My judgment doesn't catch up in time.

The guardrail hits and my whole body flinches before my brain catches up. Metal screams against metal, a sound so loud it drowns out my own gasp. The wheel jerks hard in my hands and I grab it back on pure instinct, no thought at all, just my heart slamming against my ribs and my throat gone bone dry. The tires shriek. The car swerves, weightless for one second that feels like ten, and for that one second I'm certain this is the part where it goes wrong for real, where a car in the other lane doesn't have time to react to whatever I'm about to become. It doesn't come. No headlights. No second impact.

Just me, alone on an empty stretch of road that decided tonight not to kill me. My hands are shaking so hard I can barely hold on. Then it catches. Steadies. I'm still gripping the wheel like it might come loose again any second.

I pull over. The silence afterward is worse than the noise. The engine idles rough, uneven, like it's still deciding whether to forgive me. I stay bent over the wheel until the pressure in my chest eases enough to breathe normally. There's no one left in the car to be angry at anymore, no father, no brother, just me and the low complaint of a machine that took a hit meant for something else. I count to four because it's the only trick I have. It works badly, but it works.

When I finally step out, the air hits sharper than I expected. Cold in a way that feels almost deliberate, almost like punishment. I make myself walk the length of the car once, slow, cataloging the damage before I let myself feel a single thing about it. The bumper is torn open along the right side, paint scraped down to raw metal. I crouch and run my hand along it without meaning to, the way you'd touch a bruise to make sure it's real. The alignment's off too. I can feel it in the asphalt under my own feet just standing here, something crooked that will only get worse the longer it's ignored. Fixable, probably, given time and money, two things she has and one evening she very much does not.

Still humiliating, in a way that has nothing to do with the car and everything to do with how fast an evening can go from controlled to wreckage when the one thing you can't steer is the man who raised you. Calling anyone feels like handing them one more thing to use against me later. A report, a delay, a quiet note in a file that gets pulled out the next time someone needs to prove I can't be trusted with anything, including my own car. My phone sits dark in the cupholder, and for one long moment I think about what it would mean to call him. To hear his voice ask what I did this time before he asks if I'm hurt. I put the phone face down instead.

So I get back in. The wheel pulls left the second I accelerate, and there's a low, tired strain under the hood, something groaning that hasn't quite given up yet but wants to. Not failure. Not yet. Just a warning. I drive anyway, past the parts of the city that still perform for people like me, past the boutiques and the glass towers reflecting exactly the version of myself I'm supposed to be selling tonight, until the storefronts go tired and the streets stop caring who's driving through them.

My shoulders ease a fraction the farther I get from anywhere that knows my name. My father has a way of being in a room even when he isn't in it, his voice already rehearsing what he'll say about tonight, about the car, about the version of me that speeds through guardrails instead of sitting still and being managed. I drive faster than I need to, like distance is something I can actually put between us if I just find enough of it.

The garage appears without warning, set back off the road, its roll up door open just enough to hint at someone working inside. The sign above it is old but cared for. The paint's faded with age, not neglect. Fresh enough at the edges that someone's clearly gone over it by hand more than once over the years. The hours underneath are handwritten too, but steady, legible, the mark of someone who's kept this place exactly the way it started even after it stopped needing to be kept that way. My car chokes once, coughs, protests the whole idea of continuing, right as I turn in. I cut the engine and just sit there a second, hands still on the wheel, listening to it tick as it cools.

Inside, visible through the open bay even from here, the air looks thick with heat and oil, grime soaked into the concrete for years, layer over layer, nothing about it clean or careful. My convertible gleams under the flickering shop light when I finally pull it forward, cobalt blue against gray concrete, obscenely out of place, announcing money in a room that clearly has no interest in what money looks like. This is really not a place built for someone like me. Everything about it, the smell, the grime, the handwritten hours, is the exact opposite of every room I've stood in tonight, and something in me wants that opposite so badly it scares me a little.

I cut the engine for good and sit there one more second before I get out. My fingers still feel clumsy from the crash, but I can deal with clumsy. Whatever's waiting inside that garage cannot possibly be worse than what I already walked out of tonight, and if I'm wrong, at least it will be a different kind of wrong, one that doesn't come with my father's name attached to it.