She didn't want the fight that came with the credit. She just wanted the machine to run right and the man who loved it to be safe. And she wanted to go back to her counter and disappear again the way she always did.
She stood up and that was the moment her leg betrayed her. It happened without warning, the way it always did. One second. She was rising to her feet and the next a bolt of white hot pain shot up from her right knee and buckled the whole leg beneath her and she caught herself hard against the workbench. Both hands slapping down on the steel, a gasp tearing out of her before she could stop it.
She hung there, gripping the bench, her jaw clenched so tight her teeth ached, riding it out the way she'd written it out a hundred times before. Breathe. Don't make a sound. Wait for it to pass. It always passed.
It just took longer every time. Not now. She whispered to her own leg, furious and pleading at once. "Not now, not here."
The pain crested and held, and she stood frozen and folded over that workbench, with sweat breaking out cold across her forehead. And for one terrible moment, she thought she was going to go all the way down right there on the concrete next to a motorcycle she wasn't supposed to have touched. Get up, get to the counter. Nobody can see you like this.
She'd hidden it for months. The injury, the pain, the way the leg gave out with no warning at all. Sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes on the stairs once so badly in the parking lot that she'd had to sit in her car for 20 minutes before she could drive home. She hid it because she needed the job because she couldn't afford what fixing the leg would cost. And she couldn't afford it because, well, that was a longer story, a story she told exactly no one. She hid it because she believed all the way down to her bones that her problems were hers to carry, not anyone else's, never anyone else's.
The pain finally began to loosen its grip inch by inch, and Emily forced herself upright by pure will. She wiped her forehead with her sleeve. She pushed off the bench and tested her weight on the bad leg it held, barely trembling. And she took one careful step and then another. And by the time she'd made it back across the floor to the parts counter, she'd smoothed her face back into that same quiet, unbothered expression the men knew her by.
Nobody could tell. That was the whole point. Nobody could ever tell.
She picked up her clipboard with hands that were still not entirely steady, and she went back to checking off the shipment item by item, as if the last 20 minutes had never happened. Item five. Item six. Out in the lot, Cole Walker crushed his cigarette under his boot and started back toward the building. And the three mechanics trailed after him. And Emily heard the side door bang open and their voices flood back in, still arguing, still no closer to an answer they were never going to find because the answer had already been found and put right and hidden away.
I'm telling you it's the cam, Cody was saying. It's not the cam, Marcus shot back. Enough, Cole said, and fire it up. I want to hear it again before you tear into anything else. And Emily Carter, standing behind her counter with her clipboard and her secret and her trembling leg kept her eyes down on the shipment. But her heart was pounding because she knew what was about to happen.