Finally finish the novel in your head.

The wind came off the fields and ran along the road, pressing cool grit against the fence and shoving dust through the gaps as if it meant to get in. Mara kept the shop door cracked anyway, because the inside felt like her last fixed point. AnnieShe wanted the smell of oil and warm metal the way it hit her wrists and throat when she opened the cabinets—sharp, familiar, almost grounding. The radio sat on the counter with the volume low, a thin hiss threading between stationsAva; every few minutes a voice broke through, distant and warped, like it was speaking from a room underground. Mara went out with a rag clenched in her fist, and the air tasted of diesel and wet dirt, sour on her tongue. Ethan stared at the engine, and when he finally spoke, he didn’t look back. “Your water tastes like pennies,” he said.

She crouched by the toolbox and let her hands do the remembering — the cold weight of the wrench, the give of a bolt that had turned for her a hundred times before.

Ethan didn’t offer to help. He never did, not with the small things. “You always fix the wrong part first,” he said, and she almost laughed, because it was true and it changed nothing.