The riders left as loudly as they had arrived. Jim led them out into the afternoon glare while the flatbed stayed behind, and for a long moment nobody spoke inside Apex Iron Works. Rusty looked at the black FXR, then at Leo, then at the money in his hand. He had imagined every possible ending to the confrontation except the one in which an eight-year-old gave him a reason to try again.
Leo picked up his broom. "Should I finish by the parts shelves?" he asked.
Rusty leaned against a workbench, exhausted by the change in his fortunes and unsure whether the change was real. "No," he said.
"Sit down for a minute. I think I need to hear everything you remember about your dad's drawings." He pulled out a stool and set a cup of water beside it. "And Leo? This time, I'm going to listen properly."
For nearly an hour, Leo sat at a scarred wooden table in the back office while Rusty wrote down everything the boy could remember. Leo could not give him a complete diagram from memory, and he admitted that certain details had become mixed together in the two years since his father's death. He remembered the words hybrid, timing, spare parts, and the number forty-two, which Arthur had written on the lid of a box beside his bed. He remembered a sketch of a fuel tank with a little arrow beneath one side, and he remembered his father tapping the page with a pencil and saying that the most important thing about a secret was making sure the right person could find it when the secret no longer helped anybody.
Rusty listened, resisting the temptation to fill in the uncertain spaces with his own guesses. He had spent the afternoon being reminded how dangerous it was to mistake confidence for understanding, and he did not want to repeat the lesson. He drew rough outlines of the motorcycle on a pad, marked each of Leo's memories with a question mark, and asked him to say when he was unsure. By the end, they had a short list of possibilities and more unanswered questions than either of them liked.
Pete came into the office carrying a photograph he had taken of the wiring during the previous week's inspection. "There are two lengths of wire under that tank we couldn't account for," he said. "We assumed a previous owner had added them for an accessory and removed the accessory later. I never got a good view of where they ended." He set the photograph beside Rusty's notes. "I should have kept looking."
"Or we should have stopped treating old wiring like a nuisance that had to fit our favorite explanation," Rusty said. He looked toward the boy. "Leo, if we find something that contradicts what your dad told you, you won't be in trouble. That's how you discover what's true."
"I know," Leo answered. "Dad said you can't make an engine agree with you by getting mad at it."
The line brought an unexpected smile to Pete's face. "That sounds like a mechanic who spent a lot of time arguing with engines," he said.
Leo smiled back. "He said they always won when he stopped listening."