Part 23:

That’s a long time. Yeah. But then it’ll be there forever. He thought about this for a long time. Museums keep things for a long time. Good, she said. She drew a careful line with a red marker. It should be somewhere people can see it. He looked at her drawing, the rough shape of a car in red and brown, imprecise in scale, but somehow capturing something about the proportions that surprised him.

She’d drawn it low to the ground with a long hood in the way that suggested she’d been paying closer attention to his descriptions than he’d realized. Sophie, he said. H how did you know to make it that shape? She looked at what she’d drawn. I just remembered what you said it looked like when you first saw it. She paused.

You said it had a feeling. He stared at her. She went back to drawing. He sat with that for a moment. the word coming back to him across the months and the layers of the story. Richard Sterling saying it about the car and Isabella repeating it to Ethan in the dark by the storage building. And now here it was again in his living room from his six-year-old daughter applied back to the first moment.

Some words traveled. January came with the transport logistics which were extensive. The B04 was moved from the estate on a Tuesday in the second week of the month in a climate controlled transport vehicle with the kind of careful loading process that Ethan had overseen on valuable vehicles before and which never stopped being tense regardless of how many times you’d done it.

He was there for the loading. Isabella was there, too, though she hadn’t said she would be. She arrived 15 minutes before the transport vehicle, which told him she’d been planning to come all along and had decided not to announce it. She was wearing a heavy coat and her hands were in her pockets. And she stood to the side of the activity while the loading happened, watching with the expression of someone making sure something was being handled correctly without wanting to interfere with the handling.

When the car was loaded and the transport doors were secured and the team was doing the final documentation checks, she came to stand beside Ethan. I didn’t sleep well. She said, “No, I keep secondguing. Not the decision, the shape of it, whether I’ve handled everything correctly.” You have? You can’t know that.

I know the parts I was involved in. He said, “Those were handled correctly.” She was quiet for a moment. I’ve been thinking about what you said, about the car being a historical document. That the goal isn’t to make it look new. Yes, I want that to be clear in how it’s displayed, not just technically in the interpretation, the story of how it survived.

The rust is part of what it is, not as something that was overcome. She paused. Does that make sense? It makes complete sense. Oay understands that. Oay thought of it before either of us did, Ethan said. He’s been doing this longer than both of us. She let out a breath. Good. a pause. I feel like I should say something as it goes. You don’t have to.

I know I don’t have to. They stood in comfortable quiet for a moment, the kind that had taken months to arrive at and which neither of them remarked on. My father would have hated this part, she said. The letting go of it. He was terrible at letting go of things. But he would have wanted the right outcome. Yes, she paused.

He would have wanted exactly this. The transport vehicle’s engine started. Ethan and Isabella stepped back from the loading area, giving the driver room to maneuver down the estate’s long driveway toward the gate. They watched it go. It wasn’t dramatic. It was a truck moving down a driveway on a cold January morning, carrying a wrapped object that most people passing on the street outside the gate would have no reason to think twice about.

The weight of what it was carrying was invisible from the outside. That was usually how it worked, Ethan thought. The significant things moved through the world without announcing themselves. They looked like ordinary objects in transit until someone who knew what they were looking at happened to stop and pay attention. Thank you, Isabella said.

He looked at her for all of it, she said from the beginning. A pause. and for not for handling the personal parts with care. The notebook what it meant. She paused. You didn’t have to do that. That wasn’t your job. It was the work, he said, which was what he always said, and which he’d meant differently each time he’d said it, and which by now contained all the meanings at once.

She looked at him for a moment, and something in her expression was different from every other version of her expression he’d cataloged over the months. quieter, less arranged. “I’ll see you in Detroit,” she said. “Yes.” She went back toward the main house, and Ethan stood in the cold driveway until the transport vehicle had fully cleared the gate and turned onto the road and was gone from view.

Then he got in his truck and drove to work. The consultancy work with Detroit began properly in February and settled into a rhythm that was uncomfortable for about 3 weeks before it became natural. He drove or flew to Detroit roughly once a month for 3 or 4 days at a time, working directly with Oay’s team on the restoration approach.

The rest of the time he was on Clement Street under cars doing what he’d been doing for 6 years with phone calls and emails to Detroit threaded through the days at margins that didn’t disrupt the work. It was more than he’d expected and less than he’d feared. The two things fit together less neatly than he might have imagined and more functionally than he’d had any right to hope for.

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