Chapter 7 The first crack

POV: First Person (Samuel Reed)

"Don't bolt that in," I said, before Jake had even lined up the transmission.

He froze halfway through reaching for the socket wrench and looked over at me like I’d cut him off mid sentence.

"What?" he asked.

"Just don't. Trust me."

"Sam, this is the part the supplier sent us. It's supposed to go in."

"Just wait thirty seconds."

Jake set the wrench down slow, watching me with the same look he gave customers who tried to talk him down on a price he knew was fair. Thirty seconds later, almost to the moment, my phone rang. Supplier’s number.

"Reed's Garage," I said.

"Mr. Reed, I'm so sorry, we pulled the wrong transmission for your order. We're sending the correct one out now, should be there within the hour."

I hung up and looked at Jake. He hadn’t moved.

"How did you know that?" he asked.

"I got lucky," I said.

He didn’t answer right away. He just stared at the part sitting on the workbench between us, the one we would have wasted three hours installing if he’d listened to me. Jake and I had worked side by side long enough that lying to him felt different than lying to anyone else. Strangers didn’t know the shape of my voice when I was hiding something. Jake did.

"Lucky," he repeated, and went back to work without saying anything else, though I caught him glancing at me twice over the next hour like he was waiting for a better answer to show up on its own.

We fell back into our usual rhythm after that, the kind you only get from years on the same concrete floor. He stole my good wrench off the bench without asking like he always did, and I threw a rag at his head for it like I always did, and for a while it felt like nothing had changed at all.

"This coffee tastes like it was filtered through a tire," Jake said, grimacing over his mug.

"You made it."

"That's not the point."

"That's exactly the point."

He laughed and I laughed with him, and for a few minutes the garage felt like it used to before Ethan and before the accident and before all of this. Then the bell above the door rang and a man I didn’t recognize stepped in. Mid forties, tired eyes, a jacket that had seen better winters.

"emotion scan active"

"subject, frustrated"

"concealing financial anxiety"

He hadn't said a word yet.

"You don't need the full repair," I said, before he'd even reached the counter. "Just the belt. That's what's making the noise."

He blinked at me. "How'd you know I couldn't afford it?"

I felt Jake's eyes land on me from across the garage, sharp and immediate.

"Educated guess," I said, and forced my voice into something casual. "Most engine noises this time of year turn out to be the belt."

The man nodded slow, still a little thrown, and gave Jake the keys to his car without any more questions. Jake didn’t say anything until the man walked back outside to wait.

"Sam," he said, wiping his hands on a rag he didn’t need to wipe. "What is going on with you?"

"Nothing's going on."

"That's twice today. The transmission and now this. You didn't guess either of those things."

"I've just been paying more attention lately," I said. "Reading up on negotiations and watching people more closely. It helps in this business."

Jake studied me the way he did when he was deciding whether to let something go, and for a moment I thought he might. Then he set the rag down and looked at me straight on.

"We've been friends since we were sixteen, Sam," he said. "If something's wrong, you can tell me. You know that, right?"

"Nothing's wrong, Jake."

He didn’t believe me. I could see it settle into his face, quiet and certain, the exact moment he decided I wasn’t going to give him the truth no matter how many times he asked for it. He didn’t push further. He just nodded once and went back to the car waiting outside, and something about the silence that followed felt heavier than any argument would have.

Clara showed up not long after, carrying a paper bag from the diner that smelled like grilled cheese and tomato soup.

"Figured you two forgot to eat again," she said, setting the bag down and glancing between us. "Everything okay in here?"

"Fine," I said.

"Fine," Jake said, half a second later, in the exact same flat tone.

Clara looked between us and clearly didn’t buy either answer, but she didn’t press. She handed out the sandwiches, and when she got to mine she gave me the larger one without saying anything about it, the way she always did when she thought I looked more tired than usual. Jake noticed. He didn’t say anything either.

We ate in a silence that wasn’t quite comfortable until Jake spoke up, almost too casually.

"Elite Auto Customs offered me a job again," he said, not looking up from his sandwich.

I looked up fast. "What?"

"Better pay. Better hours." He shrugged like it didn’t matter. "I turned it down."

"Good."

"For now," he added, and let that sit there between us without explaining it further.

I wanted to ask more but something in his tone told me it wasn’t an invitation. Clara glanced at me and then at Jake and quietly steered the conversation toward something safer. The weather and a customer complaint from last week and anything that didn’t involve the two things sitting unspoken at the table.

After they both left for the day, I stood alone in the garage a while longer than I needed to, running the day back through my head. Two predictions. Neither one intentional. I hadn’t tried to use the system on that customer at all, it had simply happened, quiet and automatic, the way breathing happens without you deciding to do it.

"passive proficiency increasing"

"host adaptation, twelve percent"

"What happens at one hundred percent," I asked out loud, to no one.

"No data available."

I didn’t like that answer. I didn’t like how easily today had gone either, how naturally the words had come out of me before I’d fully decided to say them. Jake used to be the one person I didn’t need to hide anything from, and now I was lying to him with the same ease I used to fix an engine. Quick and practiced and barely a thought behind it.

When Jake left that evening he didn’t say his usual line. No see you tomorrow and no easy wave through the window. He just lifted two fingers off the steering wheel as he pulled out, eyes forward, already somewhere else in his head.

I watched his truck disappear down Main Street and told myself it was nothing. That Jake was just tired. That tomorrow things would go back to normal between us.

What I didn’t see, what I had no way of seeing, was Jake pulling into the gas station two blocks from his apartment twenty minutes later. He was filling his tank slower than he needed to when a mechanic from another shop crossed the lot and leaned against his truck bed like he’d been waiting for exactly this moment.

"Adrian's still interested," the man said. "Offer's still on the table if you want it."

Jake didn’t answer right away. He just capped the tank and got back into his truck and drove off into the dark without saying a single word either way.

I locked up and stood in the bay for a minute with the lights off. The garage was quiet without him. Too quiet.

The system didn’t say anything. It didn’t need to.

The crack was already there.