"Bring anything you think helps you understand the car." Noah nodded once, as if accepting a serious responsibility. Then he asked the question that made Greg look up from the other end of the room. "Could I see the old service drawings too? Not just the computer reports?"
Victor frowned. "Why those?" Noah shifted the weight of his backpack. "Because if you know what the car looked like before everyone started changing things, you can figure out when the wrong thing happened."
The answer took Victor back to the leather-bound records he'd received after his father's funeral. He had packed them in a safe because they were valuable, never imagining they might contain something more useful than proof of ownership. "I'll find them," he said.
That afternoon, Victor canceled two meetings and went to the upstairs library. He sat at a long table covered in folders, service receipts, and old photographs of the Ferrari at racing events and summer drives. Edward appeared in several pictures younger than Victor remembered him, smiling beside the car with grease on his wrist. In one photograph, Edward stood with three men outside a brick workshop, one of them holding a wrench and laughing at something beyond the frame. Victor recognized his father immediately but could not place the mechanic in the faded overalls.
The picture bothered him. He set it aside and continued reading. He found handwritten corrections to factory drawings, notes from a restoration completed years earlier, and a list of mechanics who had worked on the car. The handwriting changed from page to page.
Some notes were precise and elegant, while others were hurried marks made by someone who expected to return before the ink dried. On one older service sheet, a name appeared beside a sketch of the timing assembly: M. Carter.
Victor stared at the initial without understanding its significance. He knew he'd heard Carter somewhere outside the household staff roster. His father's old shop had employed dozens of people, and Victor had spent most of that period traveling, building his own business, and reassuring himself that there would be time to take an interest in the family's work later. By the time he returned, the restoration shop had been sold, the employees scattered, and Edward had grown too tired to remember every story as clearly as he once did. Victor closed the folder and looked toward the window, where the afternoon sun caught the lake beyond his property.
It was easy to own a legacy, he thought. It was much harder to know whom that legacy belonged to. His father's garage had run on people who repaired things with patience, people who did not always appear in photographs or at auctions. Somewhere along the way, Victor had preserved the expensive object and misplaced the names of the hands that kept it alive.
He pressed his thumb against the faded service sheet. M. Carter. The name waited there without demanding recognition.