A longer silence followed. The customer who owned the Electra Glide was Northern Shields' vice president, a man who spent long weekends on empty northern highways and trusted the bike enough to forget he was trusting it. Sark stood slowly and looked at Willa with the expression of a person reconsidering an opinion he had formed only a few minutes earlier. Reese asked how she had spotted it from the doorway. "The light was good," she answered. "And I was looking."
There were people who liked that answer because it sounded modest. Reese liked it because it did not pretend the observation had been magic. It had been skill combined with attention, and attention was something he had found more difficult to teach than skill. He looked toward the side door, where rain ran across the threshold in silver lines.
"We've got a small room out back," he said. "A cot and a heater. You can sleep there tonight. We'll talk about work in the morning."
Willa looked up at him sharply. "What do you want in return?"
"Nothing tonight. If you take a job here, we discuss wages, hours, and expectations like adults. If you don't, we'll still send you out with a dry coat tomorrow." He let a moment pass, then added, "You can keep the room door locked from the inside. Fig will show you where the washroom is. Nobody comes in without asking."
For the first time since she had entered, her shoulders dropped perhaps half an inch. "All right," she said. It was such a small answer that nobody in the shop would have remembered it if they had not already begun to understand how much it cost her to give one.
Fig took her to the storage room after the last customer left. It had shelves full of parts in labeled cardboard boxes, a pair of folding camp chairs, several motorcycle jackets packed in clear covers, and a narrow cot with a clean blanket folded at its foot. The heater made a low steady clicking sound as it warmed. He brought her a dry towel, a spare sweatshirt still in its wrapper, and a bottle of water, then pointed out the lock and told her breakfast was usually around six.
Before he went, he paused at the threshold. "You didn't have to tell us about that frame," he said. "You could've waited and used it to make somebody look bad."
Willa stood beside the cot, one hand around the bottle. "Someone could've gotten hurt."
Fig nodded as though that settled everything. "Six o'clock, then." He closed the door behind him, and Willa waited until his footsteps had gone before turning the lock.
She did not undress immediately. She checked the window, which was high and frosted and opened only a few inches, then the back of the door and the narrow space between the shelves. It was a habit she hated in herself and could not stop. Only when she was sure the room held exactly what it appeared to hold did she peel off the wet coat, wrap herself in the blanket, and sit on the cot.