PART 7:

Ethan couldn’t have said with any certainty that he was the right person, but he was the one who was here. He stood up, brushed the mud from his knees, and went back to work. The National Classic Automotive Summit was held every spring at a convention center in Nashville, and it was the kind of event that Ethan had attended twice before as a working mechanic.

Once to buy parts, once to consult on an authentication dispute for a client, and had mostly found overwhelming in the way that any large gathering of people who take themselves very seriously tends to be overwhelming. The lobbies smelled like money and leather conditioner. The name badges had job titles underneath the names, and the job titles were always long.

People shook hands the way politicians did, maintaining eye contact a beat longer than natural conversation required, performing confidence at each other like it was a competitive sport. He registered at the desk on a Wednesday morning in late April with a rolling suitcase containing his laptop, three printed copies of his complete presentation materials, and a change of clothes that Maya had made him iron the night before with the specific instruction that he not argue about it.

He hadn’t argued. He’d ironed the shirt badly, and she’d redone it without saying anything, which was a particular quality of hers that he’d never adequately appreciated out loud. You look okay? She’d said when he was leaving that morning, high praise. Dad. She’d looked at him seriously from the kitchen doorway, still in her pajamas.

You’re right about the car. You know you’re right. Just don’t let them make you feel stupid. He’d wanted to say something reassuring but honest. And the honest part was complicated. So, he’d said, “I’ll call you tonight.” And she’d nodded and gone back to her cereal. And that was that.

He found his room, put his suitcase down, and spent the first hour of the conference walking the floor, getting his bearings and trying to locate the particular variety of anxiety he was carrying and put it somewhere useful. The exhibition floor was impressive, vehicles worth collectively more than the GDP of a small municipality, arranged under theatrical lighting, surrounded by people in blazers discussing providence with the intensity of people discussing surgery. He recognized a few faces.

Two or three recognized him and nodded, the polite nod of people who knew him as competent but not significant. He saw Victoria Sinclair from across the floor midday before they had any official reason to speak. She was talking to a group of three men near a restored early ‘7s convertible that had been consigned through her company, and she was talking with the practiced ease of someone who’d had this particular category of conversation 10,000 times.

She hadn’t seen him. He watched her for a moment, not the way you watch someone you’re hoping will notice you, but the way you observe something you’re trying to understand, and then moved on. His panel was scheduled for Thursday afternoon. He had 20 minutes for his presentation, then a Q&A that was supposed to be another 20, but that he suspected would run long or get cut short, depending on how the room decided to feel about what he said.

He’d spent weeks preparing for both scenarios. He spent Wednesday evening alone in his room going through the presentation one more time. He ordered room service and ate half of it and worked until 11 and then lay in the dark for a long time thinking about Gerald Callaway. He thought about what it meant to love something enough to protect it with your own life, your own reputation, your own quiet years in a farmhouse that was slowly going to pieces around you.

He thought about the paper tag inside the door, fragile as old skin. He thought about the frame geometry, the purpose-built crossmembers, the sheer weight and intention of the thing. He thought about Frank Dryer’s voice on the phone, careful and cautious, saying, “I assumed they were all accounted for, and what it meant that one of them wasn’t.

” He fell asleep with the light on and woke up at 5:30 and lay there in the early gray light of a Nashville hotel room until 6:00 when he got up and made bad coffee from the machine on the dresser and stood at the window looking at the city waking up below him and told himself he was ready. He wasn’t sure that was true.

He got dressed anyway. The morning session he attended was a panel on authentication methodology that was genuinely useful. three specialists discussing the evolution of V1N decoding standards and the complications introduced by partial records from specific manufacturing periods. He took notes on his phone.

One of the panelists made a comment about the persistent mythology of lost factory prototypes that several people in the room laughed at a knowing industry insider laugh. And Ethan wrote the comment down and underlined it. He had lunch by himself at a table near the back of the conference restaurant, going through his notes, and Marcus Webb sat down across from him without asking. “Mr.

Walker,” Webb said. He was carrying a plate of food that he didn’t appear to be eating. “I saw you were registered for the conference.” “Marcus,” Ethan said, “I assume you’re presenting tomorrow.” “That’s right.” Ale Webb was a trim man in his mid-40s, precise in the way that professional appraisers tend to be. He measured words the way he measured vehicles.

He looked at Ethan’s laptop screen, which was showing a page of his presentation. His expression was carefully neutral. I want to be honest with you, he said. Please. Our assessment of your vehicle was thorough. I stand behind the methodology, but I also want you to know, he paused, cut a piece of chicken, and put it down without eating it.

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