Mara waited until Leo could look up again. Then she handed him a fresh shop apron and said, "If your people approve it, you've got a trial placement. A few hours a week to start. School comes first, and you don't touch a customer's machine without supervision. Understood?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"And another thing," she added. "No calling me ma'am every five seconds. Makes me feel eighty."
For the first time since he entered foster care, Leo laughed in a room full of adults without checking whether laughter was allowed. Sully stood near the office door pretending to study an advertisement for tire balancing equipment. Mara saw his expression and tilted her head. "Don't look so proud, Jack," she said. "The kid still has to learn the difference between a clean bench and the mess you call a toolbox."
"I'll survive the insult," Sully replied. He glanced at Leo. "You might too."
The apprenticeship was not enough to settle the legal questions around Leo's placement. Investigators were collecting records from Hank's house, and the county had ordered a review of the foster license after interviewing Jonah and Molly in separate settings. Higgins had been placed on administrative leave pending an internal investigation into his conduct at the gas station. The video evidence was incomplete in some places, but it showed enough to make claims of an entirely routine pickup difficult to sustain.
Hank hired a lawyer and began telling anyone who would listen that a dangerous motorcycle gang had kidnapped his ward and destroyed his truck. He filed a property-damage complaint against several riders, and some of those complaints were legitimate. But his campaign stumbled when clinic records confirmed Leo's earlier injuries and when the youth advocate obtained the notebook the boy had left in Flagstaff, describing missed meals, threats, and work requirements that had no relationship to ordinary household chores.
The notebook was still in the schoolbag Molly had carried to class. An investigator found it after Molly showed the hiding place, and the final pages contained a list of dates and short observations in Leo's careful handwriting. One entry read, "Hank said I stole twenty dollars.
I did not. Jonah saw the bill under the newspaper after he left." Another said, "Molly asked if she has to stay here forever. I told her no, but I don't know if that was true."
When Leo learned the notebook had been recovered, he sat on a stool in Mara's shop and held his head in both hands. He had been so afraid to leave evidence behind that he had forgotten the pages he had once hidden for the younger children. Their existence meant somebody else could speak about the house without relying entirely on his memory. It also meant he would have to revisit details he desperately wanted to forget.
"I wish none of this had happened," he told Mara. His voice was barely audible beneath the shop's afternoon hum. "Even the part with the motorcycles. I wish I'd just had a normal summer."