Across town, Rusty was having a sleepless night of his own. His wife, Denise, found him at the dining table with a notebook open and an untouched plate of food beside his elbow. He told her the story from beginning to end, including Jim's threat and the surprising recognition of Arthur Hayes's name. Denise listened, then asked why he sounded more frightened now that he had found a possible explanation than he had when he believed the machine was hopeless.
"Because now I have something to lose again," Rusty said. "When we had no answer, at least the disappointment was certain. Now a child might be right and three of us might have missed it. I don't know whether I can face Jim if we get this wrong."
Denise set down her glass. "Then don't spend tomorrow trying to prove you're smarter than Leo. Spend it trying to find the truth. That's what you're good at, Ray. That's what made me believe you could build that shop in the first place."
Rusty looked at her and remembered how she had helped paint the first workbench when they had no money for a second one. He had loved machinery before he loved owning a business, but over the years the two things had become tangled in his mind. Customers expected certainty, and he had begun giving it to them even when uncertainty would have been more honest. Now an eight-year-old had reminded him of the joy of asking a simple question without caring who received the credit.
Before going to bed, he sent a message to his three mechanics. It told them to arrive early, bring the old service records, and prepare a clean inspection area around the FXR. It also said that Leo's information was a lead, not an instruction to ignore their safety practices, and that no component would be replaced or adjusted without adult verification. Then Rusty added something he had not written in years: WE MAY HAVE BEEN WRONG. LET'S FIND OUT.
Big Dave read the message over breakfast and snorted so loudly that his wife looked up from the stove. Tommy read it while standing outside a convenience store, his coffee cooling in his hand. Pete read it twice, turned to his aging electrical notes, and began checking a question he had left unanswered the week before. None of them expected the next day to be easy, but all three understood that their boss was asking them to do something different from repeating the same failed attempts.
When the first daylight touched the warehouse roofs on Wednesday, Leo was already awake. Nora had prepared a small breakfast and made him put on the sturdy shoes she kept for school, rather than the pair with holes in the toes. He tucked Arthur's notebook pages into the plastic folder, wrapped the old photograph in a clean cloth, and checked twice that he had packed the pencil his father once used to mark diagrams. At the door, Nora stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.
"You don't have to save anyone today," she said.
Leo looked up. "I know. But I think we can save the bike."
"Then let's go see what we can learn."