I set my duffel down near the workbench and walked to the center of the bay. The air inside was cooler than outside, stale and faintly gasoline-scented, the smell of every garage I had known since childhood. My parents’ garage had always smelled like this. It used to comfort me. It used to mean tools on a pegboard and Grandpa’s old manuals with oil-stained covers and the possibility of something being made or fixed. Now it smelled like absence made physical.
I looked down at the concrete. The tire marks were still there, faint, the ghost of where it had sat. A pale rectangle of floor where sunlight had never reached because my car had blocked it for three years. Someone had rolled it out of here like it was just a thing. Like it was just metal and rubber and a price tag.
Like it wasn’t seven years of my life compressed into sixty-five inches of wheelbase.
My fingers found the key fob in my pocket by instinct, and I held it for a moment before I understood what I was doing. The weight of it felt absurd. A key for a door that had been torn off its hinges.
I picked up my duffel and went inside.
