There were photographs inside the folder, too. One showed a younger Luther standing in a bare apartment beside a secondhand bed frame still wrapped in twine. On its headboard someone had taped a paper star colored bright yellow. Another showed a small metal storage box painted sky blue with a crooked white moon on the lid. Gregory remembered helping Luther carry that box up a flight of stairs, remembered asking why a man who hated clutter needed something so carefully decorated. Luther had said only that it was for somebody who deserved a place to keep her things.
Lucy brought the material to Terry at the end of the day. He was sitting on a stool beside a dismantled engine, going through parts invoices while his phone lit up with messages from his children. She waited until he had answered the last one. "We found the petition," she said, and Terry looked up. He remembered signing the statement offering childcare. He had forgotten the date but not Luther's face when he asked the favor, serious in a way Terry rarely saw.
"He thought he could make it work," Terry said. "I thought he might have been trying to do too much. I had two kids then and a third on the way. But he asked me whether I could pick up his little sister from school if the court let her stay with him, and I told him yes." Terry looked toward the office wall where the memorial photograph hung.
"Why didn't he tell us more?" Lucy asked. "Because we were loud," Terry said after a while. "Because he was trying to give her a home that didn't sound like engines and arguments all day."
At the next members' meeting, Gregory placed the folder on the table and told the crew what Lucy had found. The room went quiet in the respectful way it had the day Sky arrived. Then the practical questions began. Who would be responsible for a minor?
Where would she live? Could a child safely spend hours in a garage full of equipment, fuel, and strangers visiting from out of town? How would schooling work, and what would they do if the court reached a decision they hated?
"Hollow was our brother," Gregory said. "He tried to save her, and he didn't get the chance to finish." Terry shook his head. "And respecting him means doing this right.
We don't get to treat a fourteen-year-old like another motorcycle we can push into the shop and repair by stubbornness." The remark stung Gregory because it was true enough to deserve consideration. He had been thinking of loyalty, while Terry was thinking of everything a child needed after the room went quiet and the engines stopped.