part, Fig moved between the man and the workbench without calling attention to what he had done. Afterward he told Willa that the customer was upset about the bill, not her, and asked whether she would like him to handle the next conversation. She said she could manage, and he said that was fine, but managing was not the same thing as having to manage alone.
The first Saturday brought a club breakfast. Riders arrived early on motorcycles and in trucks, their jackets dark with the damp cold that rose from the lake. Somebody cooked eggs in the small kitchen, somebody else repaired a broken latch on the side gate, and a dozen conversations filled the room without quite drowning one another. Willa had expected a motorcycle club to measure people by volume, by how loudly they claimed space or how convincingly they told stories. What surprised her was how many of the men paid attention to the quietest person present.
A retired teacher from town came in with a box of homemade muffins for the annual toy collection. Reese knew her grandchildren's names. Sark stopped arguing with another rider to carry her box. A member with a bad back was quietly relieved of lifting duties before he had to ask. Willa did not mistake these gestures for proof that every man in the building was perfect, but she noticed that responsibility seemed to be taken seriously here even when nobody was keeping score.
On the tenth day, Willa found a problem in the billing records. The service codes on several older invoices did not match the labor entries carried over from the estimate sheets. At first she thought she had misunderstood the shop's accounting software, so she pulled previous invoices, checked the rate table, and asked Fig how the system had changed earlier in the year. By the end of her lunch break she had identified a recurring error affecting an older customer and several other accounts.
It was not theft. Sark's handwritten estimates and Fig's invoicing software had been using different descriptions for the same category of work, and a software update had mapped one category onto a higher labor rate. Nobody had intended to overcharge anyone. That did not make the money any less theirs. Willa wrote a clear note explaining the pattern, attached copies of the relevant entries, and left draft correction letters on Reese's desk without drawing attention to herself.
Reese came into the bay that evening carrying the papers. "How did you catch this?"
"The labor code didn't match the service line. I thought it was one invoice until I checked February." She kept her hands on the edge of the tool trolley. "The amounts aren't huge, but they add up. The customers should get credits."
"I've asked Fig to double-check the calculations," Reese said. "If they're right, we'll send the letters and refund the money." He looked at her for a moment. "You understand that's going to cost the shop something?"
"It costs what we owe them," she said. "The mistake already happened. Hiding it doesn't make it cheaper."