That night, in the small kitchen where they ate, Dela took her son's hand. "Theo, stay out of that garage," she said softly. "Please. Men like that need someone to fall. Don't let it be you."
Theo nodded. He meant it. His fingers found the edge of the leather notebook in his pocket, the one his father left him, and he thought of the man who had taught him that the truth in metal was the only truth that never lied. He knew what his mother had survived to keep them safe. But a machine in pain has a sound, and he had been hearing it for three days, and it was getting louder.
He had been watching the whole time. While the experts argued over laptops, the boy had been studying the engine itself: the way it sat, the way they kept resetting it. And something about their work made his stomach turn, the way a wrong note bothers a musician who cannot leave the room. They kept forcing the timing back to factory numbers.
But Theo could see, even from across the room, that this engine had never been factory. Someone had changed it: the intake, the distributor, the tiny handmade bracket near the camshaft that no production line had ever stamped. He knew that bracket. He had seen its twin a hundred times drawn in fading pencil in a notebook he carried everywhere.
His hands itched. Every hour they fought the engine, they were pushing it closer to real damage, bending a one-of-a-kind machine toward ruin.
So when Wells walked into the garage that afternoon, pale and desperate, and asked the team for the tenth time if there was any hope, Theo did something a housekeeper's son was never supposed to do. He stepped forward, and he spoke:
"You're resetting it wrong."
And that brought us back to where this story began: to Garrett Boyd slapping the water bottle from his hand, to the laughter, to forty experts staring at a boy in a grease-stained shirt who had just told them they were all wrong.
"Get this kid out of my garage," Boyd snapped.
Two technicians moved toward Theo, but Harrison Wells raised a hand. He was not a kind man; he was a drowning one. His gala was in thirty hours. His car was dead. His reputation, the thing he loved most, was about to fail on live television. And this strange, quiet boy had just spoken with a certainty that none of his forty experts had managed in three days.
"Wait," Wells said. "What did you say?"