The motor in the gate she saved for last.

Finally, it could be put off no longer, and she found herself standing in front of the giant metal beast, the motor out of the box and in her left hand, red toolbox at her feet. She could do this. She could figure it out. She shifted her shoulders, bunched them up by her ears and let them fall.

There was a slim slip of paper in the box that seemed to contain instructions, one side in English, and Spanish on the other.

Both completely foreign to her in this context.

She rooted around in the toolbox until she found some that seemed to match the picture, and stared at it. She supposed that she had to start first by dismantling the motor that was in there. And to do that she had to...

She checked the instructions. “Disconnect the power,” she muttered, finding a line that ran up to a box by the gate and examining it. There was a place where it seemed to connect, and she couldn’t see why simply pulling it out wouldn’t solve her problem.

So she yanked on the cord and hoped for the best. It came out easily, and she assumed that was that portion of the job done.

And then came the job of unscrewing a zillion fiddly screws.

By the time she had been working on it for at least fifteen minutes, she had sweat rolling down her face. And it was making her enraged. Because the motor was hung up on something, or attached somewhere where she couldn’t see it, and she couldn’t get the damn thing out. There was no indication on the instructions where this piece might be. And she would have thought that if it was attached, she would see the source of said attachment in the instructions for installing the new motor.

Except that she didn’t.

She gritted her teeth, urging herself to keep going, not allowing herself to let out a primal scream that would alert everyone around her to just how annoyed she was.

Thankfully, she still hadn’t seen Gabe around all day.

The last thing she wanted was for him to see her struggling with this. And she had the passing thought that perhaps her struggling with this had been his aim in the first place.

But she would be damned if she would be defeated. If she would let him treat her like anyone else. She was... She was going to figure this out. Blast and damn, she was going to figure it out. She growled ferociously, ignoring the fact that the muscle that ran from her neck along the top of her shoulder was starting to feel like it weighed a thousand pounds. “This is stupid,” she muttered, jerking and twisting the motor, moving her head to the side and trying to see what she was missing.

“Everything okay?”

She turned around sharply, so very aware of the fact that her hair was plastered to the front of her face, that her cheeks were probably red, and that she had sweat beaded up on her forehead. And there was Gabe. Looking pristine and perfect in a white cowboy hat and a black T-shirt that seemed far tighter than was necessary.