On that first day, Theo had drifted to the garage door with a tray of coffee. He glanced at the open engine bay for less than a minute. Then he said quietly that the timing looked wrong.
Boyd did not even turn around. "Pour the coffee and disappear," he said. The technicians snickered.
Theo set down the tray and left, but he had already seen it. And once Theo saw a wrong thing, he could not unsee it.
Hours became a day; a day became two. The team tore the engine down to its bones. They laid each part on white cloth like surgeons. They ran diagnostics that cost more than Dela earned in a year. They replaced the ignition coils, the fuel lines, the spark distribution. They reset every system back to factory specification again and again, and every time the engine stayed dead.
What unsettled them most was that nothing looked broken. Twice the diagnostics came back perfect. Every reading sat inside the green. By the book, the car should have roared to life. Instead, it lay there silent and stubborn, mocking forty men who had built their careers on the book. They started arguing among themselves, blaming the software, the fuel, each other.
Worse, they were starting to hurt it. Theo could hear it from the doorway. Each forced reset strained a part that was never meant to bend that way. They were treating a handmade machine like a factory clone, and the machine was suffering for it. A scratch on this engine was a wound on history; they did not even know they were cutting.
The pressure outside the garage kept rising, too. By the second afternoon, a television crew arrived to film a glossy preview of the auction. Wells had to stand beside the silent car and smile for the camera, sweat gathering under his collar. On air, the anchor asked with a bright smile whether the legendary GTO would actually start on stage. Wells laughed too loudly and promised it would. A rival collector called twice, voice oily with fake concern. Donors whispered; the story was already shifting from the car to the man who might fail to start it.
Inside, Garrett Boyd was unraveling. By the third morning, his confidence had curdled into something uglier. He needed someone to blame. A man like Garrett Boyd did not fail; other people failed him.
"This wasn't a breakdown," he announced loud enough for the household staff to hear. "A fault like this isn't in any manual I have ever read. Someone got into this engine. Someone who didn't belong here."
His eyes drifted, slow and deliberate, toward the kitchen doorway—toward Dela, toward her son.
The accusation hung in the air like smoke. Two of the staff stepped quietly away from the Carters, as if guilt were contagious. Dela's hands tightened around her cleaning cloth, but she said nothing. She had cleaned this house for nine years without a single complaint, and now one frightened man could turn her into a suspect with a single sentence. She had learned long ago that defending herself only made powerful men angrier.