At the edge of the crowd, Walt cleared his throat. "Victor, your father would want you to think about the workers," he said.
Victor turned toward him. "My father? You always did use his name when you wanted to lecture me."
Walt accepted the rebuke without lowering his eyes. "He started this place because people trusted him. That's worth remembering before you decide what to do next."
Margaret set down a photograph Daniel had brought. It showed a younger Frank Brooks beside an old pickup, sleeves rolled up, smiling with a wrench held loosely in one hand. The jacket in the photograph was the one Daniel now wore.
"Before you sign or decline anything," Daniel said, "I want you to look at this man. You knew his money mattered very little to you. I want to know if you understand that the man himself mattered."
Victor looked at the photograph for a long time. He had dismissed so many visitors over the years that most had blurred into an indistinct category of people he believed were unprofitable. But the coffee can returned to him with uncomfortable clarity, followed by a young man's nervous smile and a boy who had watched without speaking. For the first time, he could almost remember the particular moment in which he had decided the young mechanic's presence was an insult to the room.
"I remember his eyes," Victor said at last.
"I didn't before you started talking. Now I do. He looked as if I had told him something about himself that he was afraid might be true."
He swallowed. "I was wrong about that. I was wrong about a lot of people."
Daniel did not offer immediate forgiveness. He looked at Victor and waited to see whether the next sentence would be an excuse or an acknowledgment. Victor stared at the photograph again.
"Where do I sign?" he asked quietly. Margaret opened her briefcase to the signature page, but she did not hand it over until Victor had been reminded that he had a right to independent counsel and that the signature began a binding process with specific conditions.
Victor called his attorney. He stepped into his office for the conversation, and the showroom waited through a silence unlike any it had experienced that day.
When he returned, his eyes looked tired. "My lawyer says the numbers are defensible," he said.
"He says I should take the offer." Daniel nodded without triumph. "Then let's do the paperwork properly."
Victor signed the preliminary sale agreement and the note-restructuring arrangement that would keep the property secure while the transfer closed. Margaret signed as counsel and authorized representative of Brooks Holdings. Daniel added his signature last, his hand steady on the page despite the memory of Frank struggling to count cash at another counter decades earlier. The documents did not magically transfer legal title on the spot, and Margaret said so plainly. But they set the dealership on a different path, one Victor could no longer stop merely by ordering someone out.