Mercer took the information seriously. She explained that a place with one door could trap people as easily as protect them, and suggested Sarah leave with a relative or trusted friend instead. Sarah admitted that her closest family lived hours away. Most of her friends had families and jobs in nearby towns, and she was unwilling to bring a threat to their doors before she understood what that threat might be.
"I can have a deputy pass by during the night," Mercer said. "If you see anybody suspicious, you call. You do not go out to confront them."
Sarah nodded. She meant it at the moment. Her plans began changing the instant Mercer drove away.
There were three reasons Sarah stayed. The first was the Junction itself: a place where her grandfather's handwriting remained beneath the register and where Martin's work boots still sat under the workshop bench. The second was practical. She had equipment she could not simply replace, and a salvage yard full of sharp machinery was not something she felt comfortable abandoning without shutting down properly.
The third reason was less defensible. Someone had tried to murder a man in her parking lot, and the men who wanted him dead now knew a witness had interfered. Driving away might protect her body for a night, but she suspected it would not make her name vanish from their memories. She hated the thought of being afraid in a place she understood better than anywhere in the world.
When she told Wyatt she intended to stay, he stood so abruptly that the chair legs scraped across the porch boards. "No," he said. "You don't know what Graham's people do when a plan falls apart."
"I know what fear does when you feed it," Sarah answered.
"This isn't about pride."
"Then don't talk to me as though I'm arguing for pride. I'm telling you what I'm responsible for."
Wyatt moved closer, then stopped himself short of crowding her. The restraint was deliberate enough that Sarah noticed. He looked at the workshop and salvage yard as though trying to understand how a person could attach so much of herself to a building that needed new paint.
"There are other places to live," he said.
"That's easy to say when you haven't spent thirty years fixing this one."
"Your life is worth more than a building."
"I agree. That's why I called people who know what they're doing and didn't try to take apart your bike with my bare hands. But I also don't accept that your brother gets to decide I have to run."
He looked at her for a long time. "Then I'm staying until someone else can watch the place."
"I'm not asking you to."
"I know."
She could have refused, but the words stuck. Wyatt's presence created its own danger, and she was not foolish enough to mistake him for a guardian angel. Yet sending him out alone with no motorcycle and a brother searching for him seemed unlikely to improve her situation. Instead she told him he could sleep in the old office behind the workshop, provided he surrendered the idea that her property was now his battlefield.