Regardless of how he’d been with me on Friday, I had still made a nice, big birthday cake for him yesterday. I made one for everyone, even the ones I couldn’t stand at CCC. I didn’t have it in me to be mean and single them out by not bringing something for them too. But my favorite people at the shop got their favorite cakes. Everyone else got whatever box mix was on sale.

“Ripley, give me a break. I didn’t think you would care,“ the other voice, the one I’d been listening to for nearly the last ten years of my life, responded. It was softer, lighter, patient.

The exact opposite of Ripley’s in more ways than one.

“You think I wouldn’t care about who you hire to work with me?”

“Of course you’d care about that, but all I did was post an ad for the job opening. I didn’t think I needed to check with you about posting one. Come on, son,” Mr. Cooper said.

“Don’t fucking call me that. I’m not your son.”

If I had a dollar for every morning that I’d come into the break room and overheard them disagreeing over something in one of the two offices, I would have had enough money to go on that vacation to Greece I’d been promising myself for forever.

The first time I’d heard them fighting, it had worried me. It had been an argument over payroll and how the shop had too many employees the day after he had put me through his random test over how much I knew. I’d been worried for days that a lot of us at the shop were going to get fired. I was one of the youngest employees. If anyone was going to get the boot, I’d figured it would have been me. They could always contract out to a business that only did paint. I was fully aware of that.

Luckily, no one had gotten fired. It had taken two months of waiting around and eavesdropping almost daily to figure out that Mr. Cooper had put his foot down and wasn’t letting anyone get axed.

At least, no one got fired unless they deserved it.

Now, I just accepted that the man with the voice I liked listening to—and the face I liked looking at—picked arguments with Mr. Cooper for no reason at all. The sky was too blue? He’d blame him. There was some part that he needed that hadn’t been ordered? He’d blame him.

I didn’t get it, and I doubted I ever would; Mr. Cooper was great. Greater than great. I would give him any organ in my body if he needed it.

As much as I eavesdropped, I hadn’t been able to figure out what had happened to make them the way they were. If I really thought about it, there were a lot of things about them I hadn’t been able to figure out. None of us had, and we had tried. I had spent a lot of time listening to Mr. Cooper and Rip because something about their arguments felt… weird.

I was pretty sure there was some serious resentment, at least on Ripley’s part, but I couldn’t figure out why. Why Mr. Cooper would bring someone into the company—his company—who he didn’t get along with?

There had to be a reason why a man had shown up one day and become our newest boss, almost without warning, without anything more than a strained smile from the owner of the business and a “I’d like you all to meet Ripley” in the break room.

Ripley, this man who constantly kept his skin covered with long-sleeved shirts. I had never, ever seen him wearing anything else. Not when we worked until midnight. Not when we worked until two o’clock in the morning. Not at seven in the morning. Not even on a Saturday. He constantly hid whatever tattoos he had.

At first, I had wondered if they were ugly or old, but he didn’t strike me as the type to care what other people thought. Plus, wouldn’t he have just gotten them redone if that was the case? Mr. Cooper had never been slumming it financially, and the business had only boomed in the years since it had expanded into the restoration business—specifically with the cars Rip bought, restored, and then sold. I couldn’t think of a single car he’d worked on that hadn’t been flipped in a matter of weeks for a lot more than he had invested in them. He could have easily afforded getting tattoos redone if he didn’t like them. The only reasonable explanation I could think of was that some tattoos were intensely personal to people. I didn’t walk around flashing the one I had around.

A part of me was holding out hope that one day he’d slip up and tug his shirt up his forearm or something. He could accidentally pull up his shirt too if he wanted, and I wouldn’t complain. Knowing him, that day was never going to come. If he hadn’t shown them off already, I really doubted he ever would.

Then again it wasn’t my business what they were. If I wanted to know bad enough, I guess I could have used the favor he owed me to get him to tell me, but I didn’t. I wouldn’t, either.

Focusing on that moment though, I decided to do the same thing I always had when I overheard them. While I was at it, I could drop off the cake that I had made for Rip. Up until last year, I hadn’t even known what day his birthday was; the only reason I found out was because he’d tossed his wallet at me one day so I could grab his credit card and buy his lunch, and his driver’s license had been right there.

Last year, he had looked like he didn’t know whether he wanted to throw his cake away or eat it, but he had still thanked me.

I was expecting pretty much the exact same thing this year, but that was good enough for me.

After filling the coffee pot with water and a brand-new filter, I pulled out the secret container of decaf I hid in one of the cabinets and scooped some into the basket. Then, turning around to make sure no one was hiding in a corner and watching what I did, I filled up the rest with regular caffeinated grounds. So far, in the years since I’d taken over making the first pot of coffee, no one had caught onto my blend. Otherwise, there would be a whole lot of crying over drinking decaf.

The fact was, I didn’t need my hands shaking from too much caffeine when I had to deal with paint, and the last thing most of the people I worked with needed was anything else to get them even more wired than they were on a normal basis.

I watched the pot and waited.

I also kept listening to the two men in the room next door because there was nothing else to do. At least that’s what I told myself to justify eavesdropping. I wasn’t standing outside the office door with my ear pressed to it or anything. It wasn’t my fault the building wasn’t soundproofed that well.

“Last time I checked, this is our business and we make decisions together,” the deeper voice grumbled.

“You’re getting mad over an ad?”

“I’m getting mad over you not including me in decisions that affect me,” the younger man replied.

I had to give it to Mr. Cooper. I wasn’t sure why Rip was picking an argument with him over an ad for a job opening. I mean, really?

“Ripley, I didn’t hire anyone. All I did was place an ad.”

“It’s not that you placed an ad. It’s that you didn’t tell me about it. I’m sick and fucking tired of you doing things without telling me. You don’t listen.”

“What haven’t I listened to you about?” Mr. Cooper asked, finally sounding a little impatient.

“Where do you want me to start? You want me to work my way back or work my way in order to this?”

I winced.

This wasn’t going to get any better. I didn’t need a crystal ball to know that, if anything, this was going to go downhill real quick. Crap.

So I did what I’d been doing when I thought their arguments were on the verge of spiraling out of control—like that one time I’d heard something break from inside the office and then hadn’t seen Mr. Cooper at the shop for days afterward. He had finally told me, weeks later, that he wasn’t used to having someone else to answer to and had needed time to get away because his blood pressure had gone up so much his chest had ached.

I didn’t want Mr. Cooper, who had been taking blood pressure medicine for as long as I’d known him, to have an achy chest. So I was going to have to be the one to do something. No one else would.

A memory of my dad calling me a nosey-ass slipped into my thoughts for a second, but I forced the memories down and snagged two mugs from the drying rack beside the sink and poured identical amounts of sugar into each.

The light on the coffee maker came on just as I finished pouring the last of the creamer into one of the mugs. At the same time, I heard Mr. Cooper raise his voice on the other side of the wall, sounding more frustrated than I had heard him in a long time. “What have I honestly done lately to make you be like this with me?”