She shifted the portfolio beneath one arm.
“But it was Luther. Luther Hart.”
The socket wrench Rico had been holding struck the concrete floor like a gunshot.
Nobody laughed this time.
Jimmy Rourke’s entire body went still.
He stared at Sky.
Really stared.
Past the composure.
Past the oversized denim jacket.
Past the jeans with paint on one knee.
He looked at her face as though searching for something.
Then he found it.
The jaw.
The shape around the eyes.
The way she held herself when she was waiting.
“Luther Hart,” Jimmy said.
His voice was different now.
Careful.
Measuring.
“Yes.”
Sky watched his expression the way someone watches after saying something they cannot take back.
“You’re Luther Hart’s sister.”
It was no longer a question.
“Younger sister. Six years.”
A trace of a smile appeared.
“He used to call me Sky because he said Skyla sounded too fancy for somebody who climbed onto the roof to paint rain gutters.”
The smile disappeared almost immediately.
“He taught me everything he knew about painting before he…”
She stopped.
She swallowed.
“Before…”
Gregory Marsh walked in from the back room at that moment.
Gregory was the oldest active member of the chapter.
He had been riding since before half the men in the garage were born.
He carried a coffee mug.
Two steps into the room, he stopped.
He felt the atmosphere immediately.
The silence.
He looked at Jimmy.
Then the girl.
“What’s going on?”
“Her name is Skyla Hart,” Jimmy said.
Gregory slowly lowered the coffee mug.
“Luther Hart’s sister.”
Gregory placed the mug on a nearby shelf with the deliberate care of somebody who no longer trusted his hands.
Then he walked toward Sky.
Slowly.
Measured.
He stopped directly in front of her.
Gregory was 68, with a thick gray beard and hands that had been broken, healed, and broken again.
His eyes, when he looked at Sky, held something too complicated to name.
“Let me see your arm,” he said quietly.
Sky watched him.
Then she pushed up the left sleeve of Luther’s oversized denim jacket.
On the inside of her forearm was a small tattoo.
A wrench crossed with a paintbrush.
Below it, written in script too small to read from a distance:
LH taught me to see.
Gregory looked at the tattoo for three seconds.
Then he looked at her face.
“He talked about you.”
Sky’s expression changed.
“He talked about you a lot.”
Gregory swallowed.
“He called you the stubborn one.”
Sky’s composure finally cracked at the corners.
“He called everybody else stubborn.”
A small sound escaped her, almost a laugh.
“That was his thing. Everybody else was stubborn. He was just right.”
Gregory made a sound that was neither laughter nor anything else that had a clean name.
He reached out and placed one weathered hand carefully on her shoulder.
He squeezed once.
“How long have you been on your own?”
“Long enough.”
“How long?”
His voice was gentler the second time.
Sky looked at the floor.
“Fourteen months. Since I turned seventeen.”
The entire garage seemed to stop breathing.
“Where have you been staying?”
“Here and there.”
She raised her head.
“I’ve been okay. And I’m not here for charity.”
The wall went back up.