Then he handed her something.
A folded piece of black fabric.
Sky opened it.
A small embroidered shop patch.
Not Iron Jaws club colors.
Not membership insignia.
Nothing pretending a fourteen-year-old belonged to an adult motorcycle club.
It simply carried her initials.
S.H.
Beneath them was a tiny painted jawbone-and-serpent motif adapted from Luther’s design.
At the bottom:
IRON JAWS GARAGE ART
Sky touched the embroidery.
“What is this?”
Jimmy answered.
“Means you’ve got a workstation.”
Terry added:
“And no, it does not mean you can skip school to paint.”
Sky looked toward Gregory.
He said:
“You’re not running tonight.”
She swallowed.
“Or tomorrow.”
Her eyes filled.
Gregory continued.
“After that, we handle one day at a time.”
Sky pressed the patch against her chest.
For years, every placement had come with plastic bags.
Case numbers.
Temporary rooms.
Rules written by strangers.
This was only cloth.
But it was the first thing anyone had ever given her that meant:
We expect you to still be here.
The months afterward were not easy.
Permanent safety rarely arrived in a single courtroom decision.
Sky started school.
She hated it.
Then hated it slightly less.
Her grades in English and history were uneven.
Her art teacher became obsessed with getting her into a youth design program.
Math surprised everyone.
Sky was good at geometry.
Jimmy claimed painters always were.
She started counseling.
For the first month, she barely spoke.
Gregory drove her every week anyway.
“Waste of gas,” Sky complained once.
Gregory shrugged.
“It’s my gas.”
Child services inspected Gregory’s home repeatedly.
Sometimes the visits irritated him.
He complied.
Martha reminded him that scrutiny was the price of asking the state to trust a nonrelative placement.
Iron Jaws changed too.
Sky’s presence forced the garage to examine habits nobody had questioned for years.
Smoking moved outside.
Certain conversations stopped when minors were present.
Hazardous materials were stored more carefully.
The rear office became an actual office instead of a place people threw broken chairs.
Terry found this hilarious.
“One teenager did what twenty years of insurance warnings couldn’t.”
Gregory glared.
Michael Ventry remained in the background.
Martha learned that his investigator had indeed been hired to locate Sky.
The official explanation was that Ventry believed he had information relevant to her welfare.
Martha did not accept informal contact.
Everything went through counsel.
When investigators reviewed whether Ventry had crossed legal boundaries, they found troubling behavior but not enough at first for the revenge conspiracy the club feared.
That frustrated Jimmy.
Gregory considered it useful.
“Means we don’t invent what we can’t prove.”
Weeks later, more records appeared.
Emails.
Old communications.
Evidence that Ventry had been monitoring Luther during the original custody dispute and had provided negative information about Iron Jaws to people connected with the case.
Some claims were true.
Others were exaggerated.
The discovery did not prove Ventry caused Luther’s death.
It did not prove the old motorcycle crashes were connected.
Those remained rumor.
But it did prove something Sky deserved to know eventually.
Luther had been fighting on more than one front.
Trying to satisfy the court.
Trying to distance Sky from club conflict.
Trying to prevent people who hated him from discovering how important she was to him.
That was why he kept her secret.
Not shame.
Protection.
Gregory told Sky when Martha and her therapist agreed she was ready.
She sat on the garage floor beneath the mural.
“So he wasn’t hiding me because he didn’t want them to know I existed?”
“No.”
“Then why didn’t he tell you?”
Gregory looked up at Luther’s painted face.
“Because he thought knowing you made us a road to you.”
Sky considered that.
“He trusted you that little?”
“That much.”
She frowned.
“I don’t understand.”
“He trusted us to love you.”
Gregory’s voice became softer.
“And he knew men who hated him could count on that too.”