A brilliant strategist.
Her father’s shadow.
A rich daughter playing executive.
The truth, as far as Mason could tell, was more complicated.
Evelyn was learning in public.
That was a difficult way to learn anything.
Cameron spoke again.
“We cannot manufacture another engineering solution because we dislike the commercial consequences.”
“We also cannot withdraw the car without exhausting every possibility.”
“We have.”
“No. We’ve exhausted the possibilities we know about.”
Mason’s fingers tightened around the paper coffee cup.
That sentence sounded like Richard.
Not exactly.
But close enough to hurt.
Isaac joined the discussion.
“I need another twenty-four hours.”
Cameron sighed.
“You asked for twenty-four yesterday.”
“I know.”
“And the day before.”
“I know that too.”
Evelyn said, “You have it.”
A chair moved above.
The meeting ended.
Mason remained seated.
The lower workshop returned to its ordinary sounds.
A pneumatic wrench rattled across the bay.
A forklift beeped while reversing.
Someone dropped a socket and swore.
Mason stared at the concrete between his boots.
Then, almost too quietly to hear, he said:
“Tertiary pressure valve.”
Dominic Hale, the fifty-eight-year-old workshop chief standing fifteen feet away, looked up.
Mason continued to himself.
“Secondary seal ring.”
Dominic’s expression changed.
Mason noticed.
Their eyes met.
Neither spoke.
Dominic went back to his paperwork.
But from that moment, Mason knew the old man had heard him.
Mason’s apartment sat eleven miles away in a building constructed during the 1970s and renovated just enough to justify higher rent without changing the plumbing.
It had two bedrooms because Luna needed one.
Everything else was small.
The kitchen fit two people comfortably and three people if one remained polite.
The living room had a couch, a secondhand television, two bookshelves, and a coffee table with one corner padded because Luna had run into it when she was three.
There were very few decorations.
Mason had once lived in a house full of photographs.
He had stopped doing that.
The photographs were not gone.
They were simply kept in a box beneath his bed where memory could be opened deliberately instead of ambushing him while he carried laundry.
Luna Cole was six years old.
She had her mother’s gray-blue eyes.
That was the first thing everyone noticed.
Mason noticed other things.
The way she frowned when concentrating.
The exact tilt of her head when something did not make sense.
The fact that she hummed while assembling toys.
Those belonged to Emily too.
Some inheritance arrived genetically.
Some arrived through memories Mason had repeated so often that Luna had absorbed them without ever meeting the woman long enough to remember her.
Emily Cole had died when Luna was nine months old.
A drunk driver crossed the median outside Dayton during a winter storm.
Mason had been twenty-two.
He had been working at Vortex Motorsport for three years.
One phone call turned every part of his life into a before and an after.
Before the call, he was a young engineer Richard Vance described as “dangerous in the useful sense.”
After the call, Mason became a widower who could not remember where he left his shoes because a nine-month-old child woke every ninety minutes asking for a mother who would never walk through the door again.
He left Vortex three weeks later.
Not properly.
Not professionally.
He simply stopped.
There were forms somewhere.
Messages.
Voicemails.
Richard came to his apartment twice.
Mason did not open the door the first time.
The second time he did.
Richard found him wearing the same shirt he had worn the day before, Luna asleep against his chest, bottles drying beside the sink, engineering notebooks stacked unopened on a table.
Richard had not mentioned work.
He sat on the floor because every chair was covered with laundry.
They stayed that way almost an hour.
Finally Richard said, “You don’t owe me an engine.”
Mason looked at him.
“You don’t owe Vortex anything.”
Mason stared at Luna.
“I don’t know how to do this.”
“No one does.”
“You did.”
“My wife was alive.”
“That’s different.”
“Yes.”
Richard had paused.
“Then stop asking yourself to know how to do something no one should have to learn.”
Mason remembered that sentence.
He remembered almost everything Richard Vance ever said.