Grace noticed the sleepless mornings. She did not ask him to describe his nightmares. Instead, she made sure he knew which doors led outside, who was working late in the shop, and how to reach Rosa if he felt unsafe. She also enforced boundaries that Leo had not expected from someone trying to help him.
'If you say you're going somewhere, tell me where and when you're coming back,' she said one morning. 'Not because I need to control you. Because if you're late, I want to know whether to worry.'
Leo looked at her carefully. 'And if I change my mind?'
'Then you call. People are allowed to change their minds.'
He had never heard a rule explained that way. At Hank's house, every rule existed to make disobedience possible. Grace's rules were meant to make the shop safe, predictable, and functional, and she followed them herself. She put tools away where she expected others to find them, admitted when a repair estimate was wrong, and apologized to a customer when a promised part arrived late. Leo began to understand that authority could be something a person earned by doing difficult things honestly.
His first real assignment was not a motorcycle. It was an old generator that refused to start reliably. Grace put it on a stand and asked Leo to make a list of possible causes before he loosened a single fastener. He filled half a page with observations, then stopped and crossed out the explanations he could not support.
'Why'd you scratch those out?' she asked.
'Because I was guessing.'
'Good.' She tapped the page with one finger. 'You can guess when you're trying to figure out where to look. You don't get to call a guess a diagnosis.'
He found the actual problem after a patient hour of inspection. It was simple enough that he felt embarrassed about how much time he had spent looking. Grace didn't praise him excessively. She watched the machine run, checked the repair, and entered his name beside the completed work order as an apprentice who had performed the task under supervision.
Leo stared at his name on the form. No one had ever recorded his work that way. Hank had taken every payment from a job Leo finished and treated the money as proof of his own generosity. Grace's shop kept records because work deserved to be traceable to the person who did it.
Sully visited whenever he was in Phoenix. Sometimes he brought parts. Sometimes he had a bike to inspect, though Leo suspected he invented a few of the problems as excuses to stop by. He never interrupted Grace while she was teaching, and he never told Leo he owed the club unpaid labor for the room or the food.
One afternoon, Leo asked him about it directly. 'What happens when I work here enough to pay you back?'
Sully was leaning against a cabinet, examining a worn clutch plate. 'Pay me back for what?'
'The place to stay. The ride. The clinic. All of it.'
'You work for Grace, you get paid the wages the shop agrees to pay you. You aren't paying me for getting you out of trouble.'
'But you gave me a place.'
'I offered you a chance. That's not an invoice.'