"I'm not sending you out tonight," Terry told her. "But I can't pretend you're eighteen, either. There are people whose job is supposed to be protecting you, and we have to find someone who will actually listen." Sky's face tightened so abruptly that Lucy could almost see the door slam shut behind her eyes.
"Those people sent me to the place I ran from," she said. "I know," Terry replied, though he did not yet know nearly enough. "That's why we're going to ask for somebody independent to review what happened. We won't make promises we can't keep."
The county after-hours line took a preliminary safety report and arranged for a youth worker to contact them the next morning. Until then, Lucy remained at the garage, its back office providing a quiet place under adult supervision while arrangements were made. Sky wrapped herself in a blanket someone found in the supply cupboard and fell asleep on the narrow couch before she had managed to remove her shoes. The room held a filing cabinet, an old printer, a framed picture of the shop's opening day, and a fan that clicked every third revolution. Lucy sat at the desk finishing invoices, listening to the girl's breathing deepen into the exhausted, uneven sleep of somebody who had been afraid to close her eyes.
The next morning Sky was awake before six, sitting cross-legged near the office window with her sketchbook on her knees. Lucy found her drawing a motorcycle wheel from memory, each spoke precise, each shadow carefully considered. Outside, the garage yard was silver with dew, and somebody had already begun brewing coffee in the adjoining room. "Did you sleep?"
Lucy asked. Sky nodded. "Better than the bus station." Lucy accepted the answer without asking how many nights had been spent there, because the number was not yet the most important thing.
Terry came by with breakfast and a fresh cup of coffee for Lucy. He saw Sky's notebook and stopped in the doorway. "Do you have someone looking for you?" he asked. "Probably," she said.
"Would it be someone you're afraid of?" She put a finger over the line she had just drawn and looked at the paper for a long while. "Some of them," she answered, and Terry understood that there were several questions hidden inside those three words.
Lucy suggested a walk around the clean part of the property before the machinery started up. Sky followed her past the locked paint booth, the storage shed, and a line of motorcycles waiting for repairs. Near the fence grew a thin strip of marigolds that no