PART 6:

You think they had someone steal it? I don’t know what I think. He looked at his hands. What I know is that someone didn’t want me to have that documentation, which means someone knows what the car is. There was a silence in the shop that was different from other silences. Okay, Maya said.

She sat down on the stool by his workbench, the one she’d been sitting on since she was small enough that her feet didn’t reach the floor. So, what do you do now? He looked at her. I rebuild it. All of it from the beginning. That’ll take months. Yes, even though someone might just steal it again.

I’m not going to keep it in one place this time. She looked at him for a while, the thin December light through the high shop windows, the whiteboard with its charts and photographs, her father with his ruined hands and his absolute stillness. Okay, she said again, and that was enough. He worked through winter. He was more careful now.

Careful in ways he hadn’t needed to be before. He distributed copies of every document as he recovered or recreated it across multiple cloud storage accounts, physical copies stored at locations not connected to his home or shop, and a standing arrangement with Frank Dryer’s email that served as a dead man’s switch for the most critical materials.

He was also, for the first time since he’d started, properly angry. not at Victoria Sinclair specifically. He had no proof of her involvement, and he was careful to remember that, angry at the shape of the thing, at the possibility that a piece of history could be buried twice. first by the company that built it and then by whoever found the company’s continued interest in keeping it buried.

Angry on behalf of Gerald Callaway, who had taken something at personal risk and kept it safe for 40 years, and who deserved better than to have that act erased, he worked through the coldest part of January, which was brutally cold that year, with a space heater running in the shop and his breath fogging under the fluorescent lights.

He rebuilt the factory employment documentation. He rebuilt the archive materials through a second round of calls to the university in Michigan. This time, the archavist there, a young man named Tim, who had become genuinely interested in the research, helped him locate additional materials that hadn’t been in the original badge.

Materials that were, if anything, more significant. Because what Tim found in a box of miscellaneous factory correspondents that had never been properly cataloged was a letter. It was a letter from 1972 from a mid-level executive in the performance division to a superior discussing the evaluation unit program and the disposition of prototype assets in language that was careful and corporate but specific enough if you knew what you were looking for to constitute an internal acknowledgement that the vehicles in question were not standard production

units, not modified production units, not special order production units. Prototype. Factory-built prototype. A word that carried enormous weight in the authenticity discussions of the classic car world. Because a factory-built prototype that had survived intact and unmodified, was an entirely different category of artifact than any production car, however rare.

He stared at the scan of the letter that Tim had emailed him for a long time. Then he called Frank Dryer. Frank, they’re calling it a prototype in the internal correspondence. A long silence. How certain are you of that letter’s providence? It’s in a university archive. It came in with a documented donation from the estate of a former executive of the division. The chain of custody is clean.

Another silence. Then Frank said quietly, “Ethan, do you understand what you have?” I think so. There has never been a documented surviving factory prototype from that program. The industry has assumed for 50 years that all of them were destroyed. If one survived, it survived. Ethan said it’s sitting on a farm in Laurel County, Kentucky, under a tarp.

The old engineer was quiet for a moment. You need to go public with this. Not quietly, not a private transaction. You need to take this in front of the entire industry at once. I know, Ethan said. There’s a conference in the spring, the National Classic Automotive Summit, every major collector, every auction house, every industry journalist.

Victoria Sinclair runs one of the exhibition panels. Ethan looked at the letter on his screen. I know, he said again. He registered for the conference that evening. He paid the registration fee from the shop account, which could barely absorb it. He started building his presentation. The spring came slowly that year. The car sat on the Callaway property under its tarp through March and into April waiting.

Ethan visited it twice a week, not to work on it, just to look at it, to keep himself connected to what he was doing and why. He talked to it sometimes. He’d be the first to admit that was probably strange. “Almost time,” he said to it one gray April morning, crouching at the driver’s side, one hand on the rust eataten door sill. The car said nothing, which was what he expected and in some ways what he needed.

Because what he needed was simply to be there, to be the one person in the world who knew what this thing was and what it meant for just a little longer before it became everyone’s story instead of his. He thought about Gerald Callaway, this man he hadn’t known. this quiet, meticulous man who had loved something enough to take it out of the pipeline and hide it in the earth, who attended it in his way for 40 years and then left it to a boy he’d seen once at a funeral, and who had trusted perhaps that the right person would find it at the right time.

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