Chapter 127: Home

Wednesday began with ten folders and a pen that had given up on blue.

Adrian laid the jobs across his desk in the order Dom had finished them. Supplier invoices, the spreadsheet, the binder, and Dom’s payment notes, scrawled in a hand that looked like it was being chased. He didn’t open a program. He opened a fresh page and gave each job one line: number, parts cost, labor, amount charged, paid or not, invoice reference. Then he checked every entry against the paper behind it.

Dom’s handwriting made that a forensic exercise. A seven looked like a one that had been to war.

Where something didn’t match, he marked it and left it alone. Correcting it silently would have been guessing with a nicer pen.

The first mark was the brake pads. The sheet said $58. The invoice said $62, because the supplier had raised it in March and nobody had told the sheet. He checked the other nine. Three brake jobs, three outdated prices. Twelve dollars. Across forty jobs, Tim’s number, a hundred and sixty. Not theft. Not even a leak. A drip.

The second mark bothered him more. Job seven, an alternator: invoice in the drawer, cost never entered. The line sat blank, like a held breath.

He texted Tim a photo of the blank line. Twenty minutes later, his phone buzzed.

Tim: Found the invoice. $214. Dom confirms.

"So he’s not losing money," Tim said when Adrian called. "He just can’t see it."

"He can’t see which records are finished." Adrian watched the cursor blink. "That’s a smaller problem than a thief and a bigger problem than he thinks."

He wrote Dom’s name beside the blank row. Not as blame. As a reminder that the man had been carrying this in his head for years.

That evening he built the first version out of nothing fancier than rows and colors. One job, one row. Supplier cost, labor, charge, payment, together. Yellow for a missing invoice, orange for a price that disagreed with the supplier’s, red for a job nobody had confirmed paid. Then he fed it the ten jobs and tried to break it. He changed a price. The orange fired. One formula failed outright. He rewrote it until it didn’t.

He mislabeled one paid job as unpaid on purpose, a cheap trap, and the red cell lit like a brake light. It looked rude. It was exactly right.

He didn’t buy software. Ten records didn’t justify a subscription, and neither did his pride.

He timed himself too, because a claim without a baseline was only a mood. Ten jobs, three hours forty, most of it chasing paper. Once the sheet existed, a new job took four minutes. Dom’s Tuesday routine ate two hours.

’Four minutes versus two hours.’ He wrote it on a sticky note and didn’t underline it. Underlining was how you started believing your own brochure.

Thursday, the channel woke up.

Jenna: 41 comments on the cat. Eleven of them are sentences for us to use. One is just the word "eggs."

Rose: Which cat is the eggs for?

Jenna: Unclear. It’s the best one.

Rose: I like submissions. I don’t like unfiltered ones. Someone will send a sentence about their ex.

Adrian: Viewers submit. The three of us shortlist. Rose still interprets whatever’s picked.

Jenna: Fine. I’ll sort. Rose picks what’s paintable. Adrian writes the rules so nobody sues us over eggs.

Rose: The rules are the only part he’s allowed to write.

Adrian: I’ll write them in a memo.

Rose: With a border.

Adrian read the eggs comment twice. It had no context, no subject, and a single exclamation point. It was the first fan mail he’d ever respected.

It was a small, decent argument, and by the end it had a shape. Jenna handled the inbox. Rose handled the possibilities. He handled the part of the video where nobody had to guess what was happening. For once, nobody was orbiting his wallet. They were building something.

Jenna called afterward, at nine, which was her decision.

"You didn’t text me anything strange this week."

"I texted you about a spreadsheet."

"That counts as restraint." She exhaled. "I’m not asking you to choose. I’m asking you not to make me wait on a maybe and call it kindness."

"I can’t promise an outcome." He kept it plain. "I can promise conduct. I won’t encourage you in private and hide it from her."

"That I can work with." A pause long enough to hurt a little. "It doesn’t make the feeling stop, you know."

"I know."

She hung up. Rose’s name was already on his screen, and he felt it land, the way a person feels a door in a draft.

Rose: Did the call go okay?

Adrian: Work was fine. We also talked about the kiss. Briefly. I’d rather tell you in person than by text.

Rose: I want to know. Tonight.

Adrian: Okay.

Rose: Thank you for saying it before I asked.

It didn’t sound like forgiveness. It sounded like a standard, and he meant to meet it.

He set the phone down. Honesty, apparently, wasn’t one confession. It was a habit, and habits needed practice.

Friday at four, the Corolla sat in bay two with a headlight that matched and a hand-lettered READY tag swinging from the mirror. He’d paid for it yesterday, to the cent, and it still looked at him like a creditor.

Dom stood at the counter with his arms folded, a pen behind each ear, wearing the expression of a man who’d been promised a miracle by people with laptops.

"If this makes more work," he said, "you’re out. I’ve got a drawer of software that was supposed to save me."

"Pick a finished job," Adrian said. "Any one. We’ll check the old way against the new."

Dom picked the alternator. Tim brought the binder, the drawer, and the spreadsheet. Adrian opened the sheet. One row. $214, flagged yellow until Wednesday.

"Parts cost, labor, charge, paid," Adrian said. "All in one place."

Dom looked from the binder to the screen to the drawer. "That took you four minutes?"

"Four minutes a job. Your Tuesdays take two hours."

"Run another," Dom said.

They did four. Tim checked each against his own notes. Adrian showed the orange cell, the old pad price beside the new, each backed by a paper Dom could hold. Dom’s mouth had been a line. It gave up a quarter inch.

"Now you do one," Adrian said.

"Me?"

"If only I can run it, it hasn’t solved your problem."

Dom snorted but sat. Adrian walked him through it: invoice, cost, charge, paid. He got it on the second try, swearing softly at the colors. When he finished, he stared at the row.

"What if I did that for every job?"

"Then Tuesdays get shorter."

Dom leaned on the counter. "Don’t get ahead of yourself. Sixty jobs, back to January. Same thing for all of them. Two weeks. What’ll it cost me?"

Adrian had done that math in the shower. "Three hours forty for ten. Sixty is about twenty-two hours."

"Five hundred."

It was more than anyone had ever paid him to do arithmetic. It was also a number Dom had picked before hearing his.

"That’s twenty-two dollars an hour, and I’m supplying the electric." Adrian kept his voice even. "Nine hundred, and Tim confirms the paper."

Dom’s eyebrows said what his mouth wouldn’t. "Seven-fifty. And you fix whatever I find wrong."

"Seven-fifty for the sixty, defined. Anything outside it’s a separate quote."

Dom looked at Tim. Tim, who’d been practicing neutrality for a week, nodded once.

"Deal," Dom said, and for the first time shook Adrian’s hand like a man closing a contract and not a door.

On the sidewalk, he opened the system. The line hadn’t moved.

[Pending Opportunity: Corolla Repair — Open]

He didn’t treat Dom as a key. He wrote the difference on his phone instead: the Corolla was an expense he’d already paid, and Dom was a service he’d agreed to provide, and the system hadn’t said it cared about either. He recorded the $750 as expected, not received. He wouldn’t spend a dollar to test a theory.

Behind him, the Corolla’s new headlight caught the sun and winked. It didn’t mean anything. He decided not to read into a headlight.

On the way home, two messages arrived.

Dom: Sixty jobs. Due next Friday. Don’t be late.

Jenna: Shortlist of twelve. Rose picked four paintable ones. "Eggs" made the cut.

He added both to his calendar, then his classes, then his follow-up at the clinic, a week from Monday, which the doctor had insisted on. He had a bandage, a body that still wanted nine hours of sleep, and a Friday that had already been spoken for. The question was no longer where to find something to chase. It was how not to drop the two things already in his hands.

At home, he opened a blank sheet, typed SIXTY at the top, set the deadline in red, and began.