I MARRIED A MECHANIC TO RUIN MY FATHER'S PLAN

Chapter Six - Glass Walls

By the time the café is behind me, my feet have already made the decision. My heels find their own rhythm against the pavement, and I don't correct the path. The street thins out from restaurants to auto-parts stores and a laundromat still lit at this hour. Nobody out here knows my last name. It's the first thing all night that feels like breathing room. My shoes are wrong for this much walking, a blister already forming at the back of one ankle, but I keep going.

I only meant to be gone long enough for coffee. The garage has one bay lit when I reach it, the rest gone to shadow. The sign above the door is almost black against the night now, and the open bay throws a hard white rectangle across the pavement. My heels carry too far in the quiet, each footstep bouncing off concrete. A wrench knocks against metal somewhere inside, hollow and loud without a full crew around to swallow the sound.

He's there. Half under the hood of my car, shoulders caught in the light. Hands moving with the same precision I remember. He doesn't look up. I stand in the doorway a second longer than I need to, watching him work without an audience, the way he moves when he thinks nobody's checking. He hums something under his breath, off key, stops himself halfway through the second bar like he's caught doing it. He doesn't stop working until I speak.

"I thought you said it would be done by now."

He finishes what he's doing, checks it once more, wipes the back of his wrist, and turns. His dark blue eyes settled on me steadily, like he knew I'd come back.

"Almost."

No greeting. No mention of how long I've been gone.

"You could've texted an update."

"You could've stayed."

"I said I wouldn't interfere. I assumed that included not hovering."

"Hovering and disappearing for an hour aren't the only two options."

"How much longer?"

"Depends whether you keep talking to me or let me finish."

"That's oddly specific."

"I'm an oddly specific person."

"What else is oddly specific about you?"

That gets his attention for half a second.

"My hours. My prices. My opinion of people who speed through guardrails to avoid a conversation with their own father."

"I didn't say that was what happened."

"You didn't have to."

I nod but stay where I am.

"Give me twenty minutes," he says. "Body still needs work I'm not doing tonight, but it'll get you home."

He reaches for a rag, already turning back to the engine, the conversation closed as far as he's concerned. I don't leave. I watch his jaw tighten, just, the only sign anything's landed. My hair's loose now, not arranged the way it was in his father's study. The bruise at my lip is more visible under this light, no lipstick left to hide it. He doesn't ask. He looks away fast, annoyed at himself for noticing at all. Then his eyes drop, just for a second, to how I'm standing, weight shifted off my left foot without me deciding to do it. He doesn't say anything. He crosses to the wall where a red metal box hangs, FIRST AID stenciled across it in block white letters gone yellow with age, and pulls it open. Digs out two bandages, still in their paper wrappers, and holds them out to me without a word.

I look at them, then at him.

"It's a blister. Not an emergency."

"Didn't say it was. Didn't say it wasn't either. I just prefer my customers walking when they leave, purely for liability reasons."

I take them. Refusing would make it a bigger thing, and I have enough of those already.

"You should sit," he says, flat again, nodding toward a stool by the wall, the moment already closed off behind his eyes like the box he just shut.

"I'm fine standing."

"Wasn't a request."

I sit, mostly to prove I can do something he asks without an argument attached, though we both clock exactly how much effort that costs me. The silence stretches while he works. He hasn't looked at me the way most men do, cataloging what I'm worth before I've even finished a sentence. Small thing. Matters more than it should. Twenty minutes later, almost to the second, he wipes his hands and steps back from the car.

"It'll do for tonight."

"Thank you."

His mouth moves like he might say something else. He doesn't.

"Bring it back tomorrow. Properly, this time."

"I will."

I don't move right away. It's childish, staying a beat too long just to see if he'll look up again, but I do it anyway. He doesn't. Something about that is almost worse than if he'd watched me the whole way out. I'm just a car that needs finishing tomorrow, filed away in whatever part of his head handles things that don't require his attention twice. I don't know why that lands as a compliment instead of an insult, but it does. I stand, take my keys off the workbench, and walk toward the door, my footsteps loud now that the tools have gone quiet. He turns back to the last of the work like I've already left.

Outside, the night's gone fully dark, streetlights buzzing overhead. I sit in my car a second before I start it, looking back once at the lit bay, at the shape of him still bent over the engine, unaware or uninterested in whether I'm still watching. I haven't decided how I'm going to say it yet. Only that I am going to say it, and that whatever he says back, no is not going to be an answer. I accept twice.

I drive home with the windows down despite the cold, because the version of me that walked in here tonight wouldn't recognize the one driving away, and I want to feel the difference somewhere other than in my own head.