PART 10:

“I want the car to mean something,” he said. “Not just to be worth something. Those are different.” “She was quiet again.” Outside, a car went past on Sycamore Drive, its headlights briefly crossing the garage wall. “Frank Welder built something extraordinary,” Adrien said. “And then it disappeared, and so did he. And most of the world has no idea either of them ever existed.

If I sell this car to whoever gets here first and it goes into a private collection somewhere and sits in a climate controlled room where nobody sees it, he stopped. That feels like losing him again. Evelyn set down her mug on the workbench carefully in the space between a socket wrench and a tube of anti-seize compound.

She looked at the car for a long moment. Then don’t let that happen, she said. It’s complicated when there’s significant money involved. Most worthwhile things are complicated when there’s significant money involved, she said. That’s not a reason. He almost smiled at that. It was the kind of thing Rachel would have said, and the comparison arrived with the usual complexity.

Not painful exactly, more like pressing on a place that was still healing. He acknowledged it and let it pass. Victor Lauron has been looking for this car for decades, he said. when he gets here. And he will get here soon so he’ll have a number ready. It’ll be a number designed to make it hard to think clearly.

Will it work? I’m a billionaire, he said flatly. Money doesn’t, he caught himself. It was the first time he’d said it to her. The word just landed there in the garage between them. She didn’t react the way most people reacted. She didn’t go still. Didn’t recalibrate the way he’d watched people reccalibrate when they found out.

reassessing everything they’d said in the new light of the information, adjusting their posture toward him. She just looked at him steadily. Okay, she said. That’s it, he said. What do you want me to say? He considered this. Most people have more of a reaction. I figured, she said, “The truck with the cracked mirror, the flannel shirts, you’re not broke, but you also don’t want people to know you’re not broke.

That’s a specific choice.” She picked up her mug again. I just didn’t know the number. Does the number change anything? She thought about it honestly, which he appreciated. It changes the math on the stress you’re carrying about Victor Laurent, she said. But it doesn’t change anything about you. He was quiet.

The point is, she said, you have leverage. If you walk into that conversation already knowing what you want, he can’t move you with the number. The number is not the thing you’re negotiating for. He looked at her. What am I negotiating for? Legacy, she said. You said it yourself. The car has to mean something.

So, make that the condition. You know what you want. Make it unmovable and let him work around it. It was not complicated advice. It was the kind of thing that sounded obvious once someone said it, and that he’d been circling for 2 days without landing on because he’d been too close to the problem. He had a tendency to overengineer solutions when the straightforward version was available.

and he knew this about himself and it still kept happening. You’re good at this, he said. I’ve done a lot of negotiating with landlords and shift managers, she said. The principal is the same. Know what you won’t give up before you sit down. He nodded slowly. They sat in the warm garage with their coffee and the car and the space heater and the quiet of the neighborhood around them.

A neighbor’s sprinkler system started up somewhere. Someone had their timer set wrong for October and ran for a few minutes and shut off. “Can I ask you something?” Evelyn said. “Yes.” “Why did you buy this car?” She looked at it. “Not the version you told Bertram.” “The real reason.” The question sat in the air for a moment.

He’d known it was coming eventually. In the way, you know certain questions are waiting for you when someone is paying the kind of attention she paid. “Because I recognized it,” he said. Not the car specifically, just the thing underneath. Something everyone else has walked past. Something that got broken and nobody bothered to look at after that.

He set down his mug. I’ve been spending 2 years feeling like that. She didn’t feel the silence. She let it be what it was. I’m not I’m okay, he said, which was the sentence he’d been saying for 2 years. I just haven’t. It’s been hard to find the thing that makes me want to be somewhere, you know, not just somewhere I’m supposed to be, somewhere I actually want to be. He stopped.

He hadn’t said that to anyone. He wasn’t sure why he’d said it to her, except that the garage at night had a quality that made certain things possible. I think I know what that’s like, she said quietly. The feeling of going through the motions and waiting for something to feel real again. He looked at her. My life is not I’m not comparing, she said quickly.

What you’ve been through is different, but she turned her mug in her hands. Three years at the same diner, the same shifts, the same amount in the same bank account, no matter how carefully I manage it. There are days when I feel like I’m just She didn’t finish. Moving through it, he said.

Yeah, she said my moving through it. They sat with that for a while. The space heater hummed. The car sat between them and around them in the way objects do when they become part of a moment. Present and also something more than themselves. I’m glad you stopped on the sidewalk that first night, he said. She looked at him with the beginning of a smile that she didn’t quite let finish.

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