Chapter 2 - The Garage Floor
The gravel of my driveway crunched under the tires of our pickup truck in a rhythm I knew by heart. Rachel sat in the passenger seat with her arms crossed so tightly her shoulders looked locked. For three miles, neither of us spoke. The cab smelled of stale diner coffee and the sharp, metallic tang of dried fruit syrup.
When I cut the engine, the silence didn't lift. It settled over us like wet wool.
"You humiliated me," Rachel said, her voice shaking as she stared straight ahead through the windshield.
I turned off the headlights, plunging the cab into darkness save for the amber glow of the dashboard clock. "I humiliated you?"
"You just sat there!" she snapped, turning to face me, her eyes bright with angry tears. "He poured a milkshake over your head, Ethan! He laughed at you in front of the entire town, and you just sat there wiping your face like nothing happened! Do you have any pride left at all?"
"Pride is what gets people killed, Rachel," I said quietly, opening my door and stepping out into the cool Montana air.
"Oh, stop it with the military routine!" she shouted, getting out on her side and slamming the truck door hard enough to rattle the side mirror. "You're not on a deployment! You're a mechanic in a town where people need to know their husband can stand up to the local authorities! How are we supposed to live here now? How am I supposed to walk into the grocery store tomorrow?"
"You'll walk in the same way you walked in yesterday," I said, walking toward the detached workshop behind the house. "By pretending nothing is wrong."
"I am sick of pretending!" she cried, following me across the gravel. "I'm sick of the quiet! I'm sick of you hiding out in this garage fixing rusted-out tractors while the rest of the world actually lives! Maybe if you weren't so damn secretive—maybe if you actually told me what you were doing half the time—we wouldn't be the laughingstock of Livingston!"
I stopped by the sliding wooden door of the workshop and turned to look at her. Under the harsh glow of the security light overhead, she looked smaller than she had three years ago when we first moved here. The town was wearing her down, squeezing her between her desire for social standing and the grim, transactional reality of how things actually worked in Cole's county.
"You want to know what I was doing?" I asked, my voice dropping an octave.
She froze, her chest heaving. "What?"
"Sheriff Cole has the county escrow box in the back of his cruiser," I said plainly. "The one missing from the municipal audit. The one that pays for your brother's road crew contracts."
Rachel’s mouth opened, but no sound came out. The color drained from her face so fast she looked ghost-white.
May you like
"That's impossible," she whispered, her voice barely a breath.
"Is it?" I slid the heavy workshop door open, the old iron rollers groaning in the dark. "Ask yourself why your brother’s paving company got paid in cash three days before the audit was supposed to start."
