“Yes.”
“Good.” Mason settled at the table with his lunch and worksheet. “You should let her do the numbers.”
“Which numbers?”
“All of them.”
Ethan laughed, then saw that his son was entirely serious. He thought about the woman who had arrived with a suitcase and a folder and demanded nothing except a fair chance to work. For the first time in months, he allowed himself to imagine that the shop might become a place where a problem could be solved before it became a crisis. He didn't yet understand how much more than the shop was about to change, and it was probably better that he didn't. The first thing they needed to build was trust.
On Monday at 7:58, Claire Morgan arrived carrying a travel mug and a clean notebook. The rain had passed, leaving the mountains visible beyond the buildings and the air smelling of damp asphalt and summer dust. Her car coughed once before the engine died, and she sat behind the wheel long enough to record her mileage on a receipt. She had spent the weekend looking for a room she could rent by the week, found one over a laundromat, and calculated exactly when her first paycheck would arrive. She entered the shop with a plan, not because she assumed Ethan's permission to change things, but because she intended to be ready when he gave it.
Ethan was already in the garage. The first thing Claire noticed was the chair: crooked beside the desk, one caster turning in a direction the others refused to follow. The second was the absence of a key for the filing cabinet, which she located taped beneath the lower shelf after asking Ethan where he usually left it. He couldn't remember. She opened the drawers, saw that receipts from three different years had been mixed together, and placed a new stack of folders on the cleanest part of the counter. By nine thirty, the desktop was visible for the first time in months.
At nine forty-five, the phone rang. A man wanted to know why his work truck hadn't been finished the previous Friday. Ethan had written the answer somewhere, but his note sat under an empty coffee cup and said only WAITING. Claire listened to the man's frustration, asked for his name and the vehicle, and promised a precise callback instead of a vague reassurance. Then she walked to the garage doorway and waited until Ethan's torque wrench clicked off.
“Mr. Brennan's truck,” she said. “The red one. What's holding it?”
“Alternator bracket. The distributor sent the wrong part.”
“Have we called them?”
“I told them on Thursday.”
“Did they give you a new arrival date?”
“No.”
“Then the next call is theirs to receive. Do you have the order number?”