There were more warehouse-like buildings along this road, but none were as noisy as Henshaw’s. Half of the numerous garage doors in the second building had sparks flying out and loads of activity as guys and a couple of girls were putting together various vehicles. Trucks. Cars. One RV was being worked on in the last garage all the way down. Since it was a huge vehicle, it was being worked on in the lot, with the front of it open and a couple of people leaning in to tinker with it.
Brandon parked near the first building, where all three garage doors were open. There was also activity in the front office. The lights were on, and I could see movement inside. There were garland and lights up around the edges of the office windows. It was daytime during the week, and everyone was working.
It fazed me that everyone was moving on as if normal. And here I was feeling so out of it after being in the hospital, after dealing with murderers and everything that had happened. I didn’t know how to exist in normalcy anymore.
“Do you want to come in or wait here?” he asked. “I’ll only be a few minutes.”
I heard him, but I was temporarily distracted by the sight of the people working in the shop. “I didn’t realize you had so many employees.”
“Not really,” he said. “Two or three of them maybe. The rest are either here as apprentices with an instructor or they’re borrowing the space and tools to fix their own vehicles.”
A garage that lets people fix their own vehicles? That didn’t sound like a great business model.
My curiosity got the better of me, and I opened the door and slid out of the SUV. Brandon headed to the office and let me know I could look around if I wanted.
I ducked around to the first open garage door and leaned in, watching.
The first spot had displays of fancy bikes, the ones Brandon had told me he’d put together. The second space had a few teens looking over a moped.
I remained by the entryway, watching as one of them, a lean guy with two-tone hair, made some comment I couldn’t really hear.
The other guy looked familiar to me. His voice was deeper and reverberated louder. “I don’t know shit about mopeds. Go grab Stacey or someone who knows how to work the electrical on this piece of shit.”
When he spoke, it sparked a memory in me. Sometime during the time I’d been kidnapped, he...I couldn’t remember. But I recognized him. He had helped me out. Academy. I was sure of it.
What about the other one? And the people in the rear garage? Were they Academy, too?
Because they were arguing, I retreated. I didn’t want to interrupt.
I went around to the office, finding it strange now to be going through the actual front door and not through a window like the last time I came in.
The front office was like it had been before, with dark utility carpet and a couple of desks. Only this time, two of them were occupied.
Brandon hovered over the front of one, signing something on a clipboard. The woman behind the desk was older, maybe in her early fifties, with fine wrinkles around her eyes and lips and her white hair pulled back into a bun on her head.
She looked up instantly at me. “Hello,” she said quickly. “Can I help you?”
Brandon looked up, noted me and then went back to his clipboard. “She’s with me. Kayli.”
“Oh Kayli!” Her tone changed then. She’d been pleasant before, but it was like business pleasant. Now it was more like we were friends. “Sweetheart, did you need something? Can I bring you some water?” She got up from her desk and offered the seat she’d been sitting in. “Do you want to sit down?”
Maybe I should have stayed in the car. I felt like she knew I’d been in the hospital, and I was a bit embarrassed. How much she knew about why I was there, or anything else for that matter, I didn’t know.
I waved off the offer to sit in the chair. “Just poking around.”
The dark-haired guy I couldn’t remember the name of who had been yelling about the moped, he stuck his head in through the door from the garage. He looked right at the lady and spoke to her. “Stacey, do you have a minute?” he said in a far nicer tone than he was using earlier.
“Sure, North,” she said. She motioned to the chair again for me and then to the water cooler in the corner set up with paper cups. “Just help yourself, okay?”
She left, taking North back into the garage with her.
“Is she your employee?” I asked.
“She keeps this place running,” Brandon said absently as he was looking at some more paperwork. He finished filling out the forms and put them down. “Sorry,” he said. “I thought I’d get this out of the way now since we were close.”
“Don’t apologize,” I said, although I had far more questions for him now. After everything we’d been through together, seeing him doing work felt...strange. How could he come back to this when we had Alice and who knew who else after us?
Brandon waited a second, as if expecting me to say something more. When I didn’t, he motioned for me to head for the door. “Let’s go home, okay?”
As we left, we passed North and Stacey and the other kid with the two-toned hair, all looking over the bike. Stacey was pointing at something, explaining whatever it was they were working on.
The kid picked his head up to look my way as we passed. He was tall, lanky. Younger than North, it seemed, at least if I had to guess.
He waved shortly to me in a greeting and see you later sort of way.
I finger-waved back. I had that weird feeling in that moment.
And I felt it more with the weird look Brandon was giving the ground. He wasn’t looking up. He wasn’t looking around. He was glaring.
Sad.
Was that why the kid waved to me? Like trying to cheer me up when my companion looked so down?
Back in the SUV, I was leaning against the passenger window, watching cars and trees absently as we passed by. My brain wasn’t very focused.
“Are you sure it was safe for us to go there?” I asked. “After this morning?”
Brandon frowned as he drove. “I probably won’t go back for a while.”
I nervously raked fingernails along the edge of the seat, afraid to ask but I had to. “What did you just sign? Why were we there?”
He sighed and gripped the wheel. He ground his teeth and spoke through them. “I let it go.”
“Let what go?”
“All of it.” He blinked rapidly and wouldn’t look at me. “I can’t talk about it right now or we’ll wreck before we ever get home.”
“The…shop?”
He didn’t say anything. I guessed I was right.
He’d let go of his garage. The paperwork was to pass it over.
His own business? Just like that?
I made a face at the windshield. “Sucks.”
“Yup.” He didn’t say anything else about it.
I rode along with him in silence, angry with Alice and how, with just one phone call, we were already tense again, already trying to figure out what we should do next. I was angry at the Academy for pushing us out.
Here Brandon was, giving up everything he’d worked for. The severity of what leaving meant was settling into my stomach like a rock. A rock I wanted to throw at Alice. In her eyeball.
It felt so wrong. Was this the only way to protect everyone? To give up everything and leave?
I understood now why Corey felt so down. He probably knew this was going to happen. What else would have to change?
I glared out the window like Brandon, unwilling to say anything. Unwilling to or else I’d scream and make him go back and tear up all that paperwork.
And maybe that was why he wasn’t saying anything. He was stopping himself from doing the same thing.
We shouldn’t have to live like this.
Brandon, meanwhile, took care of getting us some late lunch at a fast food place, and then drove us back to the Sargent Jasper.
The building was just an ugly block of brown, a contrast to the posh neighborhood it sat near. It was in a prime
location, overlooking Charleston harbor on one side and on the other a small, manmade reflecting lake. The building itself didn’t fit the surroundings…although to me, that made it all the more interesting.
Seeing it now, getting back to it after what felt like forever away, carried a sense of nostalgia and an unsettled feeling in my chest at the same time.
When we left this place… would I miss it?
I was still eating fries, the last of his batch, as he pulled in to park. My eyes were glued to the apartment building, dazed at the brown brick and dirty windows. “How come you all don’t live in those neighborhoods? Like the one you put Jack in?”
“We didn’t want to,” he said. “We wanted to be downtown.” He turned off the SUV but didn’t get out. He turned, his eyebrows up, focusing on me. “Don’t you like the apartments?”
“They’re fine,” I said. “But shouldn’t we not be here?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, yeah you might be ready for Alice to show up here, but it feels…like we shouldn’t let her know where we are.”
“That’s the next step,” he said.
“It’s just that she got to us last time… Isn’t obscurity better than security?”