that had once carried him into fights he regretted. Terry stopped him before he spoke. "A safe bed with somebody checked out by the state is better than making a promise the law can break tomorrow," he said quietly. Gregory looked toward Sky, who was standing with Lucy beside the office door, and forced himself to ask what she wanted rather than tell everyone what he thought should happen.
Sky agreed to spend the night with the respite family after Natalie explained that the home was different from the residence she had left and that she could contact her advocate if she felt unsafe. Gregory asked whether she might visit the garage during the review. Natalie said supervised visits could be arranged as long as they were recorded and the adults respected the plan. It was not the outcome anyone in the garage had imagined when she appeared with the napkin. It was slower, more complicated, and more uncertain, which made Terry suspect it was the first part of their response that might actually hold up.
That afternoon Sky returned to the clean bench to collect her brushes. Jimmy had covered her unfinished practice tank so dust would not settle in the paint, and he lifted the cloth to show her that he had left her work untouched. "You can come finish it when the visits are approved," he said. "No one's putting flames on your mountain." She almost laughed. Then she reached into her pocket, brought out a pencil stub, and wrote her initials and the date on the underside of the practice tank, small enough that the customer-facing side would never show them.
Gregory watched from the far end of the room, remembering something Luther had told him just weeks before the crash. "There's a little girl who thinks I can fix anything," Luther had said, staring into a cup of coffee. Gregory had answered with a joke about changing the oil in a tricycle, and Luther had laughed too, but the laugh had faded. "I'm working on getting her somewhere better," he had added. At the time Gregory had been too distracted to ask what that meant, and now the memory landed like an unanswered letter delivered nine years late.
When Natalie took Sky to the respite home, the girl pressed the original napkin into Gregory's hand for safekeeping. "Don't lose it," she said. Gregory looked at the bent paper and the fine ink lines worn by years of folding. "I won't," he promised. He had been too late to help Luther with the fight that mattered most, but he was beginning to understand that being late once did not excuse being absent now.