Theo reached out and gently switched the engine off.
The garage rang with sudden silence, but it was a different silence than before. The dead quiet was gone; this was the hush of a room that had just watched something it would never forget.
He picked up his father's notebook from the bench, closed it softly, and slid it back into his pocket against his heart where it belonged. Then he turned around to face them all. And for the first time in three days, not a single person in that garage was looking down on the housekeeper's son.
Harrison Wells crossed the garage slowly, past his forty silent experts, and stopped in front of the boy he had almost let them throw out.
"What's your name?" he asked. "Your full name."
"Theo Carter."
Wells nodded slowly. "And your father was Samuel Carter, the man who built this engine." He looked at the car, then back at the boy. "A man whose name appears on absolutely none of its paperwork."
"No, sir," Theo said quietly. "It never did."
For a long moment, Wells said nothing. He was a man who had spent his life collecting the work of famous hands, and he had just learned that the crown of his collection, the car he loved most, was the work of a man the world had refused to credit. The realization changed something in his face.
He turned to the cameras still recording in the crowd, and he spoke loudly enough for every lens to catch it: