The empty spot on the gravel driveway where the Harley used to sit became a daily reminder of the quiet.
For the first three weeks, the silence from my family was absolute. I blocked Gage’s number, along with Mum’s and Dad’s. I left the family group chat where the laughing emojis had died a sudden death. I even went into our shared streaming accounts and changed every single password. If I was cutting the cord, I was cutting it completely.
Gage, however, couldn’t survive in the quiet for long. Once reality actually hit him, his entire fragile world imploded.
It was a rainy Tuesday evening when the front gate clicked. I looked at the security feed. It was Gage. He wasn’t wearing his crisp RM Williams shirt anymore. He was soaked through in a faded flannel, his hair plastered to his forehead, looking smaller than I’d ever seen him. He didn’t pound on the door. He didn’t shout. He just stood on the porch, staring at his boots, shivering in the Melbourne chill.
I opened the door but stayed behind the flyscreen.
“I’m not here to ask for money,” Gage said. His voice was completely shot, raw and raspy. “I just… I brought this.”
He pulled a small parcel from inside his wet jacket, wrapped in a plastic shopping bag to keep it dry.
“The workshop is gone. The landlord locked the gates last Friday because I couldn’t cover the back-rent,” Gage muttered, a tear cutting through the rainwater on his cheek. “When I was packing up the last of my tools, I found these in the corner of the office. The brass studs Amber saved up for. I went around to three different haberdasheries to find the exact matching oilskin fabric to replace what I ruined.”
He choked up, swallowing hard. My thirty-year-old brother, the bloke who had spent his entire life taking without a single syllable of gratitude, was weeping on my porch like a lost kid.
“I was a massive idiot that night,” he whispered, looking up at me with genuine desperation. “I was trying to look big in front of my mates. I was arrogant. But when everything went pear-shaped… Mum called me screaming because the townhouse landlord gave them an eviction notice. Dad called me a useless parasite for ruining their setup. That’s when I finally woke up. They didn’t care about me. They cared about the Harley and the free rent. The only person who actually backed me for me was the one I spat on.”
He pushed the parcel against the flyscreen. “Can I just say sorry to Amber? Just one minute.”
“Amber’s busy,” I said softly, taking the parcel. “And you need to go, Gage.”
I closed the door. I didn’t feel a wave of satisfaction, just a heavy, hollow pity. Blood might mean you’re related, but it doesn’t give you a blank cheque to break a child’s spirit and expect a quick hug to fix it.
I walked into the living room and set the parcel on the table. Amber was already sitting there, a massive stack of printouts spread across the timber. She’d heard every word.
“Was that Uncle Gage?” she asked, her voice completely steady.
“Yeah. He brought back the materials.” I looked at her closely. “You alright, love?”
Amber didn’t cry. Instead, she leaned back in her chair and slid a thick plastic folder toward me.
“I haven’t been sketching clothes for the last three weeks,” Amber said, a sharp, fiercely intelligent glint in her eye that looked terrifyingly like my own reflection. “I realized designing things for people who don’t appreciate them is a waste of time. So I’ve been looking at assets.”
I blinked, completely caught off guard. “Assets?”
“I looked up the liquidation notice for Uncle Gage’s workshop,” she explained, pointing to a spreadsheet she’d generated. “The bank is auctioning off the commercial lease and the remaining mechanical hoists next week to clear his default. The location is brilliant—right off the highway, heavy traffic, heaps of local riders. The business didn’t fail because of the shop, it failed because Gage is a terrible manager who spent his cash flow on pub nights.”
She looked straight at me. “You still have that capital from the property sale last year sitting in a term deposit, right?”
“Amber,” I breathed, realizing exactly where this was going.
“I don’t want him to apologize to me,” she said, her chin lifting with an undeniable authority. “I want to buy the lease. I want to restructure the workshop into a premium custom bike and apparel studio. I’ll own fifty-one percent, you own forty-nine.”
The sheer audacity of my fourteen-year-old daughter completely floored me. She didn’t want to lick her wounds; she wanted to buy the kingdom of the man who humiliated her.
“Family helps family,” Amber murmured, a cool smile touching her lips. “Isn’t that what they always say? We’ll save the workshop. And if Uncle Gage genuinely wants to learn how to be a proper mechanic instead of a frontman, he can drop off his resume. I might hire him as an apprentice.”
I stared at the paperwork, then at my daughter, a sudden warmth breaking through the coldness that had settled in my chest three weeks ago. Gage thought he had thrown a jacket at a defenseless kid. He had no idea he’d just accelerated the birth of a shark.
I pulled up a chair and smiled. “Alright, boss. Walk me through the numbers.”
